Britten’s opera Paul Bunyan tells the story of a group of American lumberjacks and immigrants to the New World. Through petty quarrels and their resolutions, surviving in the unforgiving landscape of the frontier, they learn the values of co-operation under the guidance of Paul Bunyan, a wise, giant lumberjack whose birth had been prophesied among the trees long before the American forests came to be inhabited.

In the end, an America struggling with the natural world gives way to an America of commerce and city-life in which our group of sometime lumberjacks must find their place, with Paul Bunyan remaining as a distant, guiding principle by which dreams may be achieved.

Britten produced this work to a libretto by his friend W. H. Auden during their wartime exile in New York, and the America it presents is definitely that of two Englishmen, for whom the country’s status as an idea exists with a naïve clarity born of its exoticism. Towards the opera’s end we hear “America is what you do / America is I and you, / America is what you choose to make it”. The form is that of a musical, with the score falling into distinct numbers interspersed with spoken dialogue.

It was deliberately written in a popular idiom and its creators did sustain hopes of a Broadway performance, although they were never realised. Nonetheless elements of Britten and Auden’s better-known work are in evidence. The latter’s fondness for the surprising, intellectualised adjective is seen when the night is described as the time when “the complex spirit” dissolves, and his studied artlessness in an invocation to the wind that runs “around the earth for fun.”

The composer’s skill with melodies with that ever so slightly tortured quality even when great joy is expressed is found in Paul Bunyan, and the woodsmen’s calls of “lumber” fading into the twilight create a similar atmosphere to some of the more plaintive male chorus writing in Billy Budd.

“Ben Thapa (Slim, the cook) is a powerful, competent tenor, and Themba Mvula, who plays Paul Bunyan’s foreman, shows off a rich baritone”

Taken as a wholly serious enterprise, the work can seem crassly moralising, but it is also a very charming piece of pseudo-Americana, the reductio ad absurdum of one conception of America without satire’s intention to bite. This has been suitably capitalised on in this production, with a set (by John Clarke) of flats with Rosenquist-style collages and an ensemble dressed in paint-speckled jeans and braces. The lumber-camp’s cook makes his first appearance dressed as a cowboy and narration between the scenes is provided by a country singer, charismatically performed by Simon Dodd.

Many of the principals have fine voices. Ben Thapa (Slim, the cook) is a powerful, competent tenor, and Themba Mvula, who plays Paul Bunyan’s foreman, shows off a rich baritone that improved markedly over the course of the show as he warmed up. Laurence Panter’s is definitely a character voice but with his mournful intensity and slight build he is eminently well cast as Johnny Inkslinger, Paul Bunyan’s book-keeper and an aspiring writer.

There were certain weak points. The sopranos Aleksandra Lipinska (Fido, the lumberjack’s dog) and Vanessa Frampton (Tiny, Bunyan’s daughter) show potential but could do with more support, particularly at the top of their range. The chorus struggled with their diction when singing softly which meant that the opening exposition, in which the chorus members are trees whispering to each other in America’s virgin forest, was inaudible, and the otherwise impressive stage picture formed here (the singers crowded on different levels with tall conical hats for a woodland canopy) was spoilt by fidgeting and over-casual movement.

Review: Cambridge Shorts

Nonetheless, the show is well-rehearsed and it is clear that a more systematic application has gone into it than student theatre I’ve seen in the past in Cambridge. The orchestra were likewise hard to fault. I would certainly recommend this production as a chance to see a quite charming and rarely performed Britten opera