Britten in Brooklyn, Wilton's Music Hall, London, review: 'Resoundingly hollow and off-key'

Zoe Lewis's new play, starring Sadie Frost, is based on true events

Ryan Sampson (Benjamin Britten) and Sadie Frost (Gypsy Rose Lee) in Britten in Brooklyn (Marc Brenner)

Alan Bennett in The Habit of Art manoeuvred Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden into a late-life encounter, after years of estrangement, that was imaginary but felt searchingly authentic about the touchy relationship between these former friend and collaborators and their temperamental differences over homosexuality and the creative life. The pair are back on the boards together in Zoe Lewis's new play which, by contrast, is based on true events but manages to come across as resoundingly hollow and off-key.

The piece is set in 1940-41when the composer and the poet shared a roof at 7 Middagh Street, a four-storey brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that was an artists' haven and bohemian refuge from the worsening news of the war in Europe. The play attempts to sensitise us to the vexed question of the role of the artist in war-time (both Britten and Auden were being attacked in the British press for their absence in the States) and to conjure up the louche atmosphere of hedonism, creative ferment and eccentric domestic routine in this ramshackle household. Premiered in Oli Rose's pedestrian production, it fails, I'm afraid to say, on both fronts.

When Ryan Sampson's boyish, sympathetic if insufficiently repressed Britten arrives at Middah Street, a game of “Murder in the Dark” is in half-hearted swing. Life seems to be a rather flat, joyless party hereabouts. The novelist Carson McCullers, played by a frighteningly intense Ruby Bentall, is given to slumping drunkenly in and out of the prominently placed bathtub and glowering with sexual desire for fellow-resident, Gypsy Rose Lee, the acclaimed burlesque star and stripper. Sadie Frost gives a disappointingly vapid performance as the latter, rolling her eyes and sounding like a faint echo of Mae West as she wisecracks about the professionally adverse effects on her ass of sitting down all day writing her novel, The G-String Murders.

The five-strong show feels distinctly underpopulated. Conspicuously missing are the crucial figures of Peter Pears and Chester Kallman, the lovers of Britten and Auden respectively. You'd never guess that the real-life Auden had seriously conflicted attitudes toward pacifism from the almost boorishly adamant figure (“Bugger the world”) that John Hollingworth is required to present here as a counter to Britten's misgivings. There's scant effort to get inside the collaborative process that led to the couple's ill-received operetta Paul Bunyan. In the framing scenes on the boat taking Britten back to Blighty, the composer is stirred to imagining the music for the first orchestral interlude in his great 1945 opera Peter Grimes. But as a development in this drama, it feels unearned by what has gone before. Even the mysterious naval officer who brings the summons to return home strikes a false note in his anachronistically Pinter-esque mix of charm and thuggish menace. When Gypsy declares that “the goddamn party is over”, you may wonder if it had ever begun.

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