★★☆☆☆
To open Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the coldest winter night for years may be regarded as a misfortune, though a misfortune weirdly symbolic of English National Opera’s fortunes. To bring back a 27-year-old touring production as soporific and saccharine as Robert Carsen’s, however, looks like carelessness.
Especially as ENO, having hosted Carsen’s staging twice in the show’s early years, ditched it in 2011 in favour of a much darker production by Christopher Alden, set in a dodgy boys’ prep school and laced with at least 50 shades of sexual perversity. Presumably that attracted so many audience complaints, particularly in view of the children involved, that ENO’s management got cold feet about bringing it back.
Yet it was much more gripping than