Albert Herring – review

Albert Herring might be the most under-appreciated of Benjamin Britten's operas . Often dismissed as a parochial skit at the expense of a village idiot, the perceived slightness of the piece may be due to the subtleties of Britten's characterisation and chamber-sized orchestral forces being lost in a full-scale opera house.

Giles Havergal's brilliantly effective solution has been to whisk the piece off Opera North's main stage and present it in the company's intimate rehearsal-cum-studio space, the Howard Assembly Room. Seated in a narrow horseshoe around a patch of the spiky, plastic grass found on greengrocer's displays, it feels as if you could be watching the opera in a tea tent on the village green.

The tone remains light and Eric Crozier's libretto is laugh-out-loud funny. Yet with neither the singers nor the dozen or so musicians required to over-project, the characters establish a presence that goes beyond mere parody. The fictional Suffolk village of Luxford emerges as one of Britten's great operatic communities, as suffocatingly intolerant of non-conformity as the Borough from Peter Grimes or Captain Vere's crew in Billy Budd.

Alexander Sprague excels as Albert, the greengrocer's lad appointed King of the May in the absence of any local maidens unspotted enough to be Queen. There's a genuine sense of deviance in his drunken celebration; while Marc Callahan's Sid deftly admonishes the villagers' prurience: "Stop prying and poking and probing at him/With your pious old faces delighting in sin."

Justin Doyle's conducting is lithe and colourful and there is the visceral thrill of such uncommon proximity to Josephine Barstow, whose censorious Lady Billows could best be described as the parish version of her landmark performance in Opera North's production of Gloriana – the virgin queen reincarnated in twinset and pearls.