The Pilgrim’s Progress, ENO, London Coliseum, review

Vaughan Williams never liked labelling The Pilgrim’s Progress as an opera: he knew it didn’t have much theatrical punch and described it as “more of a ceremony than a drama”. There’s not a lot of conventional action or character, and the weighty influence of Wagner’s Parsifal can be sensed in its stately pace and reachings for the ineffable sublime.

Some exigent, sceptical tastes will doubtless find it mawkishly religiose and flavourless – a soggy bread pudding. The orchestration is undeniably monochrome, the harmonic language limited, the rhythms four-square. Think what VW’s contemporary Berg was writing, and it can seem naïve to the point of inanity.

But – a huge but – it works. Its luminous simplicity and spiritual sincerity move and exalt, and what it lacks in bone and muscle, it makes up in heart and soul, universalising Bunyan’s allegory into a tale of Everyman’s path through life and our fear of what lies beyond it.

English National Opera is presenting the first full professional staging of this work since its première over 60 years ago, and a rapt audience hailed it as a quiet triumph. Key to its success is not only the committed musical interpretation authoritatively conducted by Martyn Brabbins, but a maturely sensitive and often gently beautiful production directed by Yoshi Oida and designed by Tom Schenk.

Oida’s unmodish approach is refreshingly lacking in the sensation-seeking that has marked more callow recent productions at the Coliseum. He sets it in a prison: not specifically the prison in which Bunyan wrote his book, but any prison anywhere. The Pilgrim (as VW re-names Christian) is under sentence of death. Meanwhile he dreams and remembers.

And as he does so, locked doors open and his fellow-prisoners people his visions. The monster Apollyon is a pile of filthy rags, the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains are ministers in the condemned cell.

I would have dropped the First World War footage, but otherwise Oida allows our imaginations free rein without resorting to New Age clichés.

Roland Wood sings with bullish power as The Pilgrim, and several of ENO’s brightest young hopes – Benedict Nelson and Kitty Whately among them – complement expert old-timers such as Timothy Robinson and Ann Murray in a variety of minor roles. The chorus sings with a radiant glow and Brabbins’s orchestra provides the bedrock for a performance that shines like a beacon in the night.

Until Nov 28. Tickets: 020 7845 9300