The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history of the Tower, complete with colour slides of famous beheadings. In The Mikado Gilbert uses capital punishment as a particularly spiky punchline, but in The Yeomen of the Guard, sentence of death has been passed before the curtain has even risen. The shadows are lengthening from the off, and even Sullivan’s cheeriest melodies have a dying fall. Davies compares the resulting blend of gaiety and melancholy to Twelfth Night, and for my money she’s nailed it – the point being, as Colonel Fairfax explains, that ‘it is easier to die well than to live well’.

Davies updates the story to the 1950s, and Anthony Ward’s designs move the action indoors, with daylight sloping through bars and portcullises only as a poignant reminder of a world beyond the walls. We see the Yeomen off-duty and in undress; proud but ineffective old soldiers ‘with the sun of life declining’, and one smart aspect of the updating is that the really serious and unpleasant duties are carried out by prison warders in WAAF-type uniforms. No postcard mock-Tudor here; the White Tower is not even glimpsed until the end of Act One, where it’s a ghostly and weather-beaten apparition against dark John Piper skies: ‘a sentinel unliving and undying’. (The lighting, by Oliver Fenwick, is one of the glories of the show.)

The cast, meanwhile, is very fine – as it has been throughout ENO’s series of G&S revivals. Richard McCabe is the jester Jack Point; here a battered but not (yet) broken variety comedian, handling some of Gilbert’s most self-aware dialogue with a deftness and emotional conviction that compensated for some distinctly seat-of-the-pants singing (the Coliseum acoustic is merciless on non-classical voices). But with Neal Davies as Sergeant Meryll, Alexandra Oomens as Elsie, Anthony Gregory as a graceful Fairfax and (savour that luxury casting!) the great Susan Bickley sounding noble as Dame Carruthers there was no shortage of vocal splendour.

Davies’s direction, in each case, rounded out the sharper comic edges of Gilbert’s characterisation, and nowhere more than in the pairing of Phoebe and Shadbolt – the secondary, comic romantic couple in the stock operetta set-up but here brought to the forefront of the action with playful, red-blooded and all-too-believable performances (both vocally and dramatically) from Heather Lowe and John Molloy. The choral singing was bold and colour-saturated; the orchestra, under Chris Hopkins, caught the light and shade of Sullivan’s writing – violins glinting in the light while bassoon and clarinet countermelodies sang and sighed within the texture.

True, I bristled inwardly when a spoof newsreel (with narration) drowned out the overture (Sullivan grumbled that the care he took with the Yeomen overture ‘went for nothing’ in the theatre: no change there). I’m not sure how it helped to have guardsmen doing silly dance moves during Fairfax’s ‘Is Life a Boon?’ (possibly Davies felt things were dark enough already), and why Davies crowbarred an ensemble from Ruddigore into Act Two is anyone’s guess. And no spoilers here, but Gilbert offered several suggestions as to how his final, crucial stage direction might be interpreted, and so artfully constructed is The Yeomen that any of them can transform the audience’s reaction to the entire show. Davies seemed to sidestep the choice altogether.

That apart, this was as close to the Yeomen of my dreams as I expect I shall ever see. There’s no way that The Yeomen of the Guard was ever going to be the fun, money-spinning hit that ENO achieved with its Mikado, Pirates and Iolanthe; and it’s as far as can be imagined from last year’s screwball, pantomime-adjacent HMS Pinafore. Instead, ENO has done precisely what a national opera company ought to be doing (and what the Royal Opera has consistently failed to do) – taken a risk on an intelligent, inventive and thought-provoking reappraisal of a masterpiece of Anglophone opera. (It would take another three decades and a world war before European operetta achieved this level of emotional sophistication and theatrical craft.)

The parallel with Shakespeare is wholly valid. This is work of international importance, a living tradition with a huge potential audience that demands and deserves a place in the theatrical capital of the world. To the agenda-driven mindset of the Arts Council wonks who’ve just signed ENO’s death warrant, that in itself is probably enough to condemn it. You’d hope that the guilty parties would go and see productions like this; that they’d watch and listen without prejudice, that they’d reflect and learn. But in my experience, that’s simply not how these clowns operate.

The post A towering achievement: ENO’s The Yeomen of the Guard reviewed appeared first on The Spectator.