Britten’s Albert Herring is a bold choice to open their new chapter, but this cracker of a show proves the relocation might just come off
On 4 November 2022, Arts Council England (ACE) dropped the axe on English National Opera. The company was removed from its national portfolio of organisations guaranteed to receive funding, and its £12.6m annual grant withdrawn. ACE dangled a £17m lifeline, but it came with one condition: the company must relocate outside London. Less “levelling up” than levelling ENO to the ground.
Outcry soon forced a walk-back – a temporary bridging grant to keep the doors open, increased funding for relocation, the deadline for the big move postponed. Everything went quiet for a while, until last November when ENO announced Greater Manchester as their new home. The relocation won’t be complete until 2029, but this month marks the first time in 40 years that ENO will live up to the “National” in its title, taking a new production on the road to Salford’s Lowry. So how does the future of opera look?
The first thing to say is that this is a very soft launch. One show, four performances. Opera at full-scale is big and expensive – it takes time to make it, still more to move it somewhere new. Of course it was always going to be the last piece in the puzzle. But ENO has already got various initiatives not involving its big opera performances off the ground – projects revolving around health, football and youth opera. It’s hard, then, not to see opera as a bit of an after-thought while the company prioritises wellbeing and community.
ENO’s brilliant first Manchester-bound production is a strong argument against all that, though. Or it will be, if anyone buys tickets.
Because Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera Albert Herring – while properly funny and charming and wry, a pastoral romp with a cheeky grin on its lips and a gratifying sting in its tail – is an odd choice for what Lowry chief executive Julia Fawcett has called a “landmark moment”. Lacking the name-recognition of bigger Britten, and the tunes of a Puccini or Verdi, it requires people to take a risk to find out that they love it.
And there’s lots to love in this “black-box” staging – the cast perform without a proper set – by director-designer Antony MacDonald, who propels the action forwards from 1900 to the date of composition, to Britten’s own local Suffolk towns in the late 1940s. A village in search of a May Queen is forced to crown grocer’s boy Albert Herring – the only virgin in the vicinity – May King instead. Some spiked lemonade and a wild night later, and virtue takes a downward turn.
Village politics and hypocrisies are evergreen, and McDonald’s update catches the rhythms and social currents familiar to anyone unlucky enough to sit on a local council or committee. He embellishes Britten and librettist Eric Crozier’s deft caricatures – the misty-eyed schoolteacher, the plodding policeman, the all-powerful lady-of-the-manor, the fluttering vicar – with delicious detail. We hardly miss having a proper set, so rich is the characters’ squabbling and scheming among the plywood and schoolroom chairs.
Soprano Emma Bell’s human tank of a Lady Billows flattens all in her path. Her elderly aristocrat is a Trunchbull-esque figure, resplendent in army uniform, dispensing caresses as well as orders to her long-suffering “companion” Florence (a gleeful Carolyn Dobbin, whose impeccable diction turns “country” into a punchline). Bell soars above all vocally, providing ballast along with Mark Le Brocq (as mayor and black-marketeer Mr Upfold) for a young cast who must make Britten’s complex ensembles heard.
Conductor Daniel Cohen gets some keen, chewily textured playing from a chamber-sized ENO Orchestra, juggling the tricky tonal shifts of a score that swings from cartoonish to disarmingly sincere. Tenor Caspar Singh brings a lot of the latter in an understated, sweetly endearing account, his lyrical tenor softening the sharpest corners of Britten’s angular phrases. There’s clarity and brilliance of tone from Aoife Miskelly’s Miss Wordsworth, and stocky depth from Andri Björn Róbertsson’s Superintendent Budd.
It’s vintage ENO: opera actually-in-English rather than laboriously translated; the kind of intimate, quick-footed ensemble show that the Royal Opera, with its international stars – who blow in often for minimal rehearsal – can’t easily pull off. Modern (but not too modern) it also speaks of an ambition to do more than roll out the classics, to bring something particular, vernacular to the company’s newly national identity.
Will it work? ENO have done their bit – have reached out with a cracker of a first show. Now they just need Salford to reach back.
Albert Herring is at the London Coliseum and The Lowry, Salford to 22 October, 2025, eno.org
