Billy Budd: A Staged Concert – Wilton’s Music Hall, London

Writer: Herman Melville, adapted by Mark Leipacher

Director: Mark Leipacher

Billy Budd, performed by The Faction at Wilton’s Music Hall, feels more like a rehearsal than the staged concert it’s billed as. Mark Leipacher directs his adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella about the ‘handsome sailor,’ Budd, a letterless young man whose innocence and good nature draw everyone to him. He’s as far as you could imagine from being a subversive.

But it’s 1797. Britain, at war with revolutionary France, is rocked by two naval mutinies at Nore and Spithead, which raise the spectre of more widespread insurrection. So when one of the ship’s senior officers takes a secret dislike to Billy, the tragic plot is set in motion for Billy to be first falsely accused, then tried and condemned to death for accidentally killing a senior officer with no recourse to a full trial.

The strength of Leipacher’s show is the fabulous performing of sea shanties by the four-strong ensemble: sweet-voiced Jack Heydon is well cast as Billy, with Christopher Staines, Nadia Nadif and Niall Hemingway playing various other characters on board the battleship. The musical arrangements are deft, and the singing, particularly in the first half, is powerful and true, the ensemble creating real drive by their foot-stomping and drumming.

But in terms of drama, this Billy Budd is underpowered. The script is oddly flat. It’s a slight story to begin with, and Leipacher plays it straight, never deviating from Melville’s original. Where the story of an enchanting, other-worldly young man cries out to be explored for its homoerotic and spiritual nature, Leipacher sticks to Melville’s idea that the central crime is merely envy, the antagonist Claggart simply consumed by envy of Budd’s popularity. This really leaves the actors nowhere to go. They can only portray emotions on a spectrum from mateyness to sullen resentment – nothing that truly gets at the explosive hatred that simmers under the surface.

Added to this, the singers, excellent as they are, just don’t have the necessary acting skills. They don’t always project well and often swallow lines when not actually fluffing them. Beyond this is the strange directorial decision to have them armed with their scripts. Does a staged concert mean they can’t learn their lines? An occasional glance at a copy might go unnoticed, but they cling to them like comfort blankets, even when trying to coil a rope or play the accordion. The fact that one of them uses an iPad draws even more attention to this distracting device.

The story itself is created by small chunks of exposition at first in the form of newspaper reports. These readings attempt to give context to the complicated context of British naval history. But nothing is fully developed, and unless you know your Patrick O’Brian, you’d be hard put to pick up the essentials. The various characters Billy encounters tend to be slightly drawn, and it’s asking a lot of three actors to make them all convincingly distinct. In the first half, the music gives impetus, immediately bringing alive every scene. But in the second, potentially more dramatic half, the whole thing loses pace. There is far too much slack time spent explaining the details of martial law, and even the debate about charging Billy with murder is oddly stilted and undramatic. The singers themselves seem to lose confidence, not maintaining the high standards they’d set earlier on.

A shout-out, however, to Holly Pigott for her set design. Minimal as it is, the decision to leave a few music stands at the back of the stage creates an uncanny suggestion of distant ships’ rigging.

Mark Leipacher and The Faction have an impressive list of successful productions. Alas, at this showing, at least, Billy Budd is not going to be one of them.

Runs until 27 September 2025