Paul Bunyan review – a cross between Cunning Little Vixen and a TUC meeting

Wilton’s Music Hall, LondonBritten and Auden’s folklore opera might be barmy – with singing lumberjacks, a blue ox and a giant superhuman and unseen hero, but ENO has turned it into something genuinely worthwhileWhat on earth is Britten’s Paul Bunyan? A satire on capitalism? A New World response to Soviet-style social realism? A Broadway musical manqué? Or the fever dream of two young artists let loose on a baffling slice of foreign folklore? In its first ever ENO production, it appears to be all these things and more, but it’s the fever dream that comes out top.Britten and Auden, in the US to try to escape the war, originally thought they were writing a high-school operetta; but the 1941 premiere was given at Columbia University, and the work was withdrawn straight afterwards, re-emerging only in the 1970s. Auden’s libretto couches pointed passages in swaths of archness. Britten’s music assumes myriad stylistic guises, shrugging them on and off with seeming simplicity. Continue reading…
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