The Way Back Home, ENO, Young Vic: 'Not even a farting penguin can save it'

This almost Disney-ish new opera will both fail to engage adults and leave children feeling patronised, says Rupert Christiansen

An emotional vacuum: the oversized fowl does its best in 'The Way Back Home'

This is a new one-act chamber opera based on a masterly illustrated book for young children by Oliver Jeffers, published seven years ago. Not unlike Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, it presents an unnamed small boy alone in his bedroom who has a fantasy of escape into another world where parental rules and everyday logic do not apply.

Finding an aeroplane in his cupboard, he flies it to the moon, where it runs out of petrol. Similarly stranded is a weird but agreeable Martian, whom he befriends. How to return to a nest of safety and security is the underlying theme – a psychologically resonant one for any child, starkly dramatised by Jeffers in few words and spare images.

Oddly, the director Katie Mitchell and librettist Rory Mullarkey have chosen to expand this haunting fable into something glibly twee and arch – one might almost say Disneyish in its U-certificate cosiness. Joanna Lee’s score is pert, brash and restless, without ever delivering a thumping good tune or creating any atmosphere (she appears to have listened to Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, but not to have learnt much from it), and the designer Vicki Mortimer has sugared up Jeffers’s austerely wistful drawings into a riot of two-dimensional jokiness, very pretty in itself but too knowingly cute to engage a child’s imagination.

Mitchell’s staging is slick and fluent, but desperately over-egged. Four tiresomely gurning Gummidgey figures proclaim themselves in a prologue to be “gizmos” and subsequently frolic around providing extra sound effects and choric commentary (a device Mitchell also employs in her “serious" work). The character of a mute penguin is played up: his gratuitous farting provoked the children in the audience to their only proper laugh of the proceedings.

“Why was the lady a boy, or why was the boy a lady?” I heard one astute child ask his parent as we filed out. The question is germane: Victoria Simmonds gives a game performance in the central role, but assigning it to an adult mezzo-soprano only intensifies the pervasive sense of mumsiness in the air.

Focus groups from local primary schools have contributed to the development of the production, but as so often when such things are heeded, the result is a mish-mash of compromises that will please nobody. There’s no real emotion here: adults will find the show simpering, children will find it patronising.

Until Dec 23. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org