Great though my admiration for Benjamin Britten’s music is I wouldn’t consider him a creator of memorable female characters.  There’s Ellen Orford, of course, but one struggles to find a Tosca, Lucia or Violetta in his oeuvre.  I open with this because what struck me watching the 2001 Channel 4 film of Owen Wingrave for a second time was how generally unsympathetic the female characters are.  This is an opera with a female librettist (Myfanwy Piper) and the film has a female director (Margaret Williams) yet, with the exception of the fairly ineffectual Mrs. Coyle, the female characters embody an unthinking militarism and behave with extreme malevolence towards Wingrave; none more so than his “girlfriend” Kate. The filming reinforces this with close up scenes of groups of the women spitting venom at young Wingrave.

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