The Pilgrim's Progress – review

It took Vaughan Williams more than 30 years to realise his ambition of composing a stage work based upon The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's epic allegory, and it has been twice as long since the result was part of the repertory of a major British opera company. Though there have been concert performances and semi-stagings in the interim, most recently one conducted by the late Richard Hickox at Sadler's Wells in 2008, ENO's production, directed by Yoshi Oida, is the first fully staged professional one in London since Covent Garden hosted the premiere in 1951 and revived it the following year.

It has become an article of faith for the English-music lobby that The Pilgrim's Progress had to be seen again as Vaughan Williams intended; though he carefully called it a "morality" and not an opera, he always insisted it belonged in the theatre. But Oida's staging raises more questions than it answers about the work's dramatic viability. The story of the Pilgrim's journey to the Celestial City is presented as a series of tableaux in which none of the characters emerges identifiably in three dimensions; even the Pilgrim is more significant for what he represents than for who he is. A two-and-a-half-hour opera whose action is symbolic and whose purpose is loftily didactic, in which the dramatic pulse beats rather slowly and sometimes vanishes altogether, can be tough going at times.

Oida attempts to put some muscle into the narrative by relocating the action within a first world war prison camp, strikingly depicted in Tom Schenk's designs. In the process, it makes the final stages of the Pilgrim's journey much bleaker, as well as introducing an explicit element of Christian ritual to the early scenes, and giving a cartoonish brittleness to the always-problematic Vanity Fair sequence. The stagecraft is wonderfully expert, and there is no mistaking the effort that has gone into it all, but it doesn't do the trick, and really only serves to confirm that the 2008 concert staging provided all the theatrical context the music needs.

It is the magnificence of so much of that music, with its web of allusions, direct and indirect, to so much of Vaughan Williams' output, that is the saving grace here. Martyn Brabbins clearly believes in the score's quality and conducts it with wonderful breadth and assurance; the orchestra and chorus make it seem sumptuous. Though some of the solo singing is more variable, Roland Wood impressively sustains the role of Pilgrim, even if his tone lacks the radiance it sometimes needs; and singers of the calibre of Benedict Nelson, Mark Richardson, Timothy Robinson, Ann Murray and Kitty Whately switch between the plethora of cameo parts as they come along.

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