The Pilgrim's Progress, ENO, Seven magazine review

The strange case of Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress remains tantalisingly unresolved. Until the opening of ENO’s new production – the first full professional staging in Britain since the work’s premiere in 1951 – the question had been how this great English composer’s magnum opus could have been so unfairly neglected. In the light of Monday’s performance, attention will shift back, not always flatteringly, to the work itself.

This is a pity, for Vaughan Williams’s score, one on which he laboured for 40 years, contains music of great luminosity. Martyn Brabbins conducts a warm, surging performance of a score that adds up to a compendium of all the composer’s stylistic fingerprints.

Though mysticism can succeed on the operatic stage, the inherent lack of drama in this adaptation of John Bunyan’s allegory proves crippling here.

Hopes were high for the staging by Yoshi Oïda, whose unforgettable Death in Venice at Aldeburgh in 2007 and clear affinity for ritualised theatre seemed to promise an illuminating evening. Sadly, he bolts his own narrative onto this parable with obfuscating results, resorting to some First World War imagery that is both too obvious and inconsistently applied.

Tom Schenk’s flexible set, a series of metal cages and platforms, is ingenious, but the prison-uniform costumes are drab, relieved only with a vengeance in the gaudy and overlong Vanity Fair scene.

At the centre of a large cast, Roland Wood has a fine baritone but lacks the charismatic eloquence required for the Pilgrim on stage, reinforcing the feeling that this work would lose very little in concert performance.

To Nov 28; www.eno.org

This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph.

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