La Bohème – review

Opera productions are changeable things. Some decline in quality after their opening run, others don't cohere until revival time. Jonathan Miller's English National Opera staging of La Bohème falls into the latter category. It was deemed baffling when new in 2009, and overly cool on its second outing a year later. Reworked a third time by Natascha Metherell, it has become a beautifully integrated piece of music theatre, sung with great fluency and acted with an understated veracity that makes it immensely moving.

Some of it is less overtly quirky than before. Miller's hard-edged view of Bohemianism as posh boys slumming it has been toned down. The first encounter between Gwyn Hughes Jones's bullish but tender Rodolfo and Kate Valentine's heartbreaking Mimì is now a complex tangle of desire and emotion rather than the mutually calculated pick-up it once was. It's a staging in which men are seen as immensely vulnerable. Richard Burkhard's Marcello – played as a shy charmer, rather than boisterous – hankers timidly after Angel Blue's classy Musetta. Duncan Rock's charismatic Schaunard goes to pieces as Mimì dies, while Andrew Craig Brown's Colline, intellectual yet naive, looks on in numb bewilderment.

The performances are glorious. Valentine has the seeming ability to unleash tremendous depths of emotion with the most restrained means. Once past a couple of uneasy moments at the start on opening night, Hughes Jones was wonderfully assured. Blue has the vocal clout and presence of a diva in the making. I can't imagine Rock and Craig Brown, meanwhile, ever being bettered in their respective roles. The ENO orchestra is terrific, too, producing detailed yet passionate playing for Oleg Caetani. This is one of the best Bohèmes to be heard in London in recent years.