Samuel Barnett on becoming Britten

Actor Samuel Barnett first appeared on UK screens in 2006 in the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and has since enjoyed a rich career, appearing on stages from Shakespeare’s Globe to Broadway, as well as in TV productions from horror drama Penny Dreadful to sci-fi fantasy Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Fresh from a third run of one-man show Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, for which he won the inaugural The Stage Edinburgh Awards 2022, Barnett is set to resume the role of Benjamin Britten in Mark Ravenhill’s Ben and Imo, which comes to London’s Orange Tree Theatre after a successful run at the Swan Theatre with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The play explores the tempestuous friendship between Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst (played by Victoria Yeates) as they work together to write Gloriana ahead of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953.

I meet Barnett during a rare afternoon off rehearsals for a conversation which ranges from the cultural heights of RuPaul’s Drag Race (we discuss whether Britten, were he alive today, would have been a fan of the show, and whether Billy Budd might yet appear on the lip-sync playlist) to Barnett’s own relationship with classical music, fostered by his mother, and how that, alongside his own experiences, allowed him to find the empathy needed to embody the character of Britten as Ravenhill writes him.

What did you know about Benjamin Britten before taking this character on?

All I knew about Britten was that he was this incredibly lauded English composer who (to my mind) wrote inaccessible, difficult music. When I started thinking about this role, I listened to Billy Budd and realised I'd grown up listening to this music, my mum had played it during my childhood. I realised Benjamin Britten isn’t difficult and inaccessible and the more I listened, especially to things like Gloriana, the more I understood it. Now, of course, I think he is a musical genius and everything he does is brilliant.

What sort of research did you undertake to embody the character?

I read a couple of biographies of Britten and one of Holst, but with any character I’m playing, whether real person or fictional, I start with the script. Mark Ravenhill has written a very particular slice of Ben and Imo’s lives together – the writing of Gloriana – which I think is brilliant. It's better than trying to tell the whole story of his life; you can reveal so much more about a person, real or not, if you take something specific about them. In good writing, the more specific something is, the more universal and relatable it becomes.

Mark Ravenhill said he was interested in writing a story about a friendship between a gay man and a straight woman, because there's not a lot of that out there. If you were to shrink Ben and Imo down, it's about their friendship and that's the thing that always anchors me as Ben in this show; everything comes back to the relationship between him and Imo. Of course, that then contains worlds, it contains who they are and what their relationship was, and it's also got a huge amount to say about art, genius, arts funding and public art.

I think Mark has captured an awful lot of who Britten and Holst were. When we performed it last year, so many people who had known them and worked with them at Aldeburgh came to see it, and said to us afterwards, ‘It was like seeing Ben and Imo again, it was like they were there.’

One of the most helpful things we did to prepare was visit Aldeburgh. That I think, more than anything, gave me a sense of the world that they inhabited and who Ben is. We spent four days there, we rehearsed in Jubilee Hall, we went to the Red House and to the archives of the Britten Pears Foundation. We saw things like the particular letter that Ben reads out to Imo during the play, and we visited their graves. You've got Britten and Pears next to each other, side by side, then just behind them is Imogen Holst’s grave.

What do you feel is different about inhabiting the character of Ben this time around?

When we rehearsed Ben and Imo last year, we did some beautiful, subtle work in rehearsal and then we got it onto the stage at The Swan, which is quite a big auditorium, and suddenly a lot of that subtlety went out the window because there's an audience that you have to let in. But The Orange Tree is in the round and it’s a smaller venue so it’s much more intimate. It's meant that vocally, we don't have to project as much and we've been able to take it back to something that still feels theatrical, but also feels really truthful and in the moment.

The script of Ben and Imo is so dense with subtext, the lines just skitter across the top of the meaning and it's all about the silence and what's not said. That’s harder to do when you're having to really project and it's easier in a space where you can literally just talk to each other and know that everyone's going to hear. That shift has been really nice, and it's helped me get back into Ben, because trying to find the truth of who these characters are, trying to find the joy in him, and why Imo likes him in the first place is a heck of a lot easier when you can do a smile and a wink that everyone will catch.

We did quite a particular version of this show last year, and a lot of audience members went away saying, ‘Benjamin Britten just seems like a monster, why would Imogen carry on working with him?’. He did this thing that they called ‘corpsing’, where he would have such close relationships with people, and then out of nowhere, he would freeze them out. Ravenhill had found a really true psychological foundation for Ben doing that, and we played that very strongly at the RSC. But of course, that belies the fact that Ben was also incredibly funny, charismatic, warm, loving, witty, playful – as well as occasionally behaving really badly.

I'm so glad we're getting to do it again, because we're not changing anything about the script at all, but we're loving making the relationship between Ben and Imo much richer, we're really investing in what hugely great friends they were. They are so close, they love each other so much that they can have horrendous, blazing rows and their friendship can survive, and that, I think is truer to history and reality than the version that we originally did. Holst stayed in Aldeburgh and supported Britten and Pears for the rest of her life. She devoted herself to music and to the festival and to them, and they to her.

With competition for creative opportunities being so fierce, and artists being assessed now on their personality as well as their talent, do you feel, having occupied a character who is so capricious and has been so difficult to work with, that there is still space in the industry for this kind of ‘difficult genius’?

I think the idea of ‘genius’ is used to excuse an awful lot of terrible behaviour, and I don't think there's any room in this industry for bad behaviour. I think it's unnecessary, it's patriarchal and it's too often excused. I think women wouldn't be allowed to behave that way, and men are allowed, to be very binary about that.

Ben is capricious, but what I've realised coming back to him this time around, is that it's too simple to dismiss – or excuse – someone as a tortured genius. I can't play any character unless I can find empathy for them and that, I think, is massively missing in society. We're probably better at it in the cultural sector, because as artists we deal with humanity and creativity, but the more we all learn about ourselves – in terms of self-awareness, social skills and management of ourselves and other people – the better.

I also wonder: is it genius, or is it neuro-divergence? Why do certain people seem to have access to channelling music or words? We call a person a ‘genius’ because we don't understand what it is, but I wonder if it's just a different brain. So one of my approaches with Ben was to think, ‘Gosh, I wonder. The way he behaves, he has meltdowns, he gets overwhelmed, he has a special interest and a real monotropic focus on it – that seems neurodivergent to me.’ That isn't in any way to excuse bad behaviour, but one person's ‘tantrum’ might be another person's neurodivergent meltdown and in society we probably don't have enough understanding of that.

Britten and Peter Pears’s relationship was an ‘open secret’ until Britten’s death in 1976, but became more well-known after Britten’s death. How did you draw on your own experiences as a gay man working with the culture sector to portray Britten?

When I graduated from drama school in 2001, the landscape was very different in terms of visibility and representation. So I could definitely relate to feeling hidden, and that societal shame – I certainly had my own shame as a gay person growing up because it felt wrong, compared to what I was supposed to be. That’s what I find extraordinary about Ben and Peter; neither of them got married and lived life in the closet, they just couldn't do it. I relate to that because I was told early on in my career that it might harm me if I'm out, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I can relate to the fact that Ben couldn't be anyone other than who he was, because that's what I've always felt.

I love that Ben and Peter were absolute pioneers, they literally lived together openly as partners, and I wonder if it was tolerated because of their talent. I'm not comparing myself to talent at that level, but I think a lot of the reason I didn't get more bullied at school was because I did the school plays and the school musicals, and I was good so I was kind of left alone. I think talent can protect you sometimes,

Originally written for BBC Radio 3 to mark the centenary of Britten’s birth, Ben and Imo was reimagined for the stage in 2024. How do the play’s origins in a purely audio medium change how it feels to perform on stage?

I never heard the original, because I didn’t want to be too influenced by it, but it makes so much sense in terms of how the play is written, because it's very dialogue-dense. The History Boys was done as a radio play, and funnily enough, hardly anything was changed. I think when dialogue is good, it conveys character and relationship, you don't even need to see it. If a script is good enough, you can feel anyway, what's happening in silences, but to also be able to see when there's a silence is a real bonus. I think it translates really well to the stage, and I'd be so interested, once we're finished, to listen to that original play and hear that kernel of the idea, which has now been expanded into this full-blown production.

How are you hoping the audience responds to Ben and Imo?

What I love about Ben and Imo is that you get to see how an opera is written, and within that you get to see these two characters who, although they are set in the 50s, are completely contemporary. It doesn't feel like a historical piece, their relationship feels very now and they were so ahead of their time. Imo doesn't get married, she doesn't settle down and have children, she's out there on her own, a woman of her own means, in the 50s, bringing music to the whole of the UK.

One of my favourite bits is when Imo talks about ‘genius’, and she says to Ben, ‘I've realised that genius is genius, and you either have it or you don't, and you do’. But then she talks about the quieter, steadier, duller personality without which genius is impossible, and it's such a brilliant line because it humanises this whole process which can seem so kind of out of reach. Ben's a genius, because his brain works that way, but Imo, in her own way, was an absolute genius – if we're going to throw that word around – it's just that she's happy not being in the limelight. She had a very famous father, and she doesn't aspire to that.

Connor Mitchell, our musical director and supervisor who also wrote some music for the show, got us invited to a recording of some lost Imogen Holst music that had just been found. We got and sat there listening to this orchestral, beautiful, brilliant, soaring and joyful. I hope the audience gets some of who she was and how brilliant she was because, as a woman, she's been kind of written out of history.

Ben and Imo returns to The Orange Tree Theatre this wekend (19 April). Further information, including tickets can be found here.

All images courtesy of RSC