The Flying Dutchman, ENO, London Coliseum, review

A force 10 gale launches The Flying Dutchman, and fearless skipper Edward Gardner sailed ENO’s new production straight into the storm.

What followed was a thrillingly dangerous journey during which Gardner – a Wagner greenhorn, though you wouldn’t have guessed it – never faltered, steering the ship manfully through massive breakers as well as calmer waters.

Anyone can make an orchestra play triple fortissimo, and it’s also relatively easy to energise the shanties and folksy waltzes scattered through the score.

But what was most impressive about Gardner’s interpretation was its overall sense of pace and drama: when a much more seasoned maestro conducted this opera at Covent Garden last autumn, the duration had seemed dismally protracted. Not here. Gardner knocked a good 10 minutes off the maestro’s timing, but he was never in an impetuous rush – the loss, or rather the gain, came from firmer grip on a tighter rope.

It should also be said that the crew of ENO’s orchestra was on cracking form, doing Cap’n’s bidding as though life and death depended on it. Nor have I ever heard ENO’s chorus sing with more gusto. Excellent diction marked the performance, too, abetted by David Pountney’s crisp, credible translation.

Alas, neither the singing nor staging were quite so inspiring. Although James Creswell sang with dignity and security as the Dutchman, his characterisation – more Byronic than nautical – came over as recessively stolid rather than charismatically mysterious. It isn’t fair on him that memories of Bryn Terfel in this part are so fresh, but that’s show business.

Orla Boylan had pitching problems in some of the higher reaches of Senta’s cruelly taxing vocal lines; lower down, she sang cleanly and gamely met the production’s considerable ask, including submission to a gratuitous gang-bang during the sailors’ Act 3 rave-up.

Clive Bayley was a creepily venal Daland, and Stuart Skelton made much of the thankless, hapless Erik. But the evening’s most elegant singing came from Robert Murray as the Steersman.

Jonathan Kent’s period-unspecific mise-en-scène is fine as far as it goes.

He adopts the familiar dramaturgical concept that the opera is Senta’s dream, showing her during the overture (and first act) as a little girl absorbed at bedtime in a picture book telling the Dutchman’s story. The girls in her father’s ship-in-a-bottle factory think her a deluded fool, and when she finally slits her throat in hysterical self-sacrifice, one feels they might not be wrong.

It doesn’t quite add up (the Dutchman is a palpable presence to others, not a figment of Senta’s fantasy) but what I crucially missed in Paul Brown’s rather prosaically enclosed set was a quality haunting Gardner’s orchestra – a sense of the ocean’s vast and portentous power.

Until May 23. Box office: 020 7845 9300