Albert Herring, English Touring Opera/Linbury Studio Theatre, review

The Britten centenary jamboree gets off to a cracking start with English Touring Opera’s finely tuned production of Albert Herring.

Stuffed with blatant class caricature, this is a piece that in the wrong hands can seem toe-curlingly smug and dated, like a bad Ealing Comedy. How can one unwrap it?

In a programme note, the director Christopher Rolls claims that “the key thing about Herring is that it is very, very funny”, but although he handles the action with a nice light touch, it’s something disturbingly sardonic rather than downright farcical which makes his interpretation so striking.

The people of Loxford emerge here as a horrible bunch – venal, snobbish, craven, devious and scarcely more decent than the inhabitants of Peter Grimes’ Borough. The way they ritually humiliate the pathetically twitching Albert is unfeeling to the point of cruelty, and really not very, very funny at all.

Neil Irish’s set is framed by a lattice which suggests an animal’s cage, trapping the characters inside a set of social roles and proprieties. Outside, the world looks dark and unknown. This isn’t camp Mapp and Lucia territory: it’s more dangerous, and more interesting, than that.

Nothing in the score quite measures up to the inspired first scene – a virtuosic demonstration of the art of conveying personalities in music through the dramatically unpromising material of a procedural committee meeting – but Michael Roswell’s conducting of an excellent band sustains the dramatic impetus admirably as well as honouring its crystalline instrumental detail.

The cannily selected cast is without any spots of weakness. Mark Wilde rightly resists the temptation to make Albert too overtly a figure of pathos, emphasising instead his Bolshie resentment of his female antagonists – a cadaverous drudge of a mother (Clarissa Meek) and the vacuously pompous and turkey-plump Lady Billows (Jennifer Rhys-Davies).

Anna-Clare Monk carols sweetly as the fluttering Miss Wordsworth and Rosie Aldridge makes a splendidly competent Florence Pike in a lesbianic trouser suit, but they are only marginally more sympathetic than the wretched representatives of the cloth, the law and local government (Charles Johnston, Timothy Dawkins and Richard Roberts). Sid and Nancy (Charles Rice and Martha Jones, both excellent) are not a pair to be trusted.

This is a comedy which is much more sharp-edged and subversively risqué than it looks, in a performance which avoids none of the tricky questions it poses.

Until Wed, then touring until Nov 16. Tickets: 020 7304 4000