Punch and Judy

Published Monday 21 April 2008 at 10:30 by George Hall

London audiences get their second chance within a month to see Harrison Birtwistle’s first opera, while simultaneously his new work The Minotaur premieres at the Royal Opera House.

Daniel Kramer’s production for ENO at the Young Vic makes less of the ritualised formality of the piece than Michael McCarthy’s for Music Theatre Wales, but is an equally vital and theatrically effective enterprise. With their circus paraphernalia and grotesque facial appendages, Giles Cadle’s designs stress the piece’s stated antecedents in popular puppet theatre, deriving ultimately from the Italian commedia dell’arte - Andrew Shore’s rude, leering Punch is a nastier distant cousin to Canio in Pagliacci - while Peter Mumford’s lighting is brilliant at changing our emotional perceptions of a scene at the flick of a switch.

In any case there are lots of different ways of presenting a masterpiece, which the opera increasingly looks like being - Edward Gardner’s engaged conducting and superior playing from the ENO musicians certainly see to that.

And this is a first-rate cast, with Shore’s half-disgusting, half-pathetic creation rightly holding centre stage, while surrounded by Lucy Schaufer’s comic-grotesque Judy, Gillian Keith’s mesmerisingly ditzy Pretty Polly, Ashley Holland’s stern Choregos, and Graham Clark and Graeme Broadbent’s impeccable double-act as the Lawyer and the Doctor. Whether Punch really needs his group of mimicking mimes is open to question, although they execute Quinny Sacks’ choreography with alacrity. The piece fascinates once again.