Eddie Wade and Caspar Singh celebrate Albert’s “coronation”, ENO’s Albert Herring 2025 © Genevieve Girling
ENO / Daniel Cohen
The Coliseum, London, October 13, 2025
Of Britten’s sixteen operas (if one counts his thoroughgoing 1948 adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera), only Albert Herring (1947) – one of the clutch of chamber-operatic works composed between Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951) – is an out-and-out comic opera. True, there are comedic moments in his two children’s theatre pieces – Let’s Make an Opera! (The Little Sweep) and Noye’s Fludde – as well as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but none can be categorised as comedies per se. For those whose image of the operatic Britten rests on Grimes, Gloriana, and The Turn of the Screw (all of which have featured, however briefly, on the Coliseum’s stage recently), Albert Herring – of which this is ENO’s first ever production – may come as something of a surprise.
In three acts lasting a little under two-and-a-half hours, this is an engaging modern morality play about an “unspoiled” young man being picked as May King because there are no virginal local girls to be chosen. Albert Herring is a full-evening stage work conceived for touring to smaller venues in the still-rationing, war-exhausted Britain of the late 1940s; and, indeed, the production transfers to Manchester a week later. As with the production of Peter Grimes two years ago, director Antony McDonald has updated the setting from the original 1900 to the year of Herring’s completion, though it is largely the post-war costumes, created in association with Ilona Karas (curiously omitted from the booklet biographies), that give the game away. That, and the ration-dodging, black-marketeering subplot involving the butcher, Sid – acted and sung with real comic timing and flair by Dan D’Souza – and the starchy, hypocritical mayor, Upfold (hammed up nicely by Mark Le Brocq).
McDonald’s minimalist, modular set, of itself representing little of 1947 or any other time, prove malleable enough to stand for interiors or exteriors of Lady Billows’s house, the Herrings’ shop, and the vicarage with little modification (other than signage, pointedly changed by a stagehand with a ladder), with assorted chairs, tables and fruit boxes providing the furniture. It all gave a rather “make-do” feel appropriate to the period, mirroring the opera’s central premise that if there is no fitting local girl, they must make do with a man.
Emma-Bell wields the sword – and the power © Genevieve Girling
Running this “making-do”, initially reluctantly, is Lady Billows, resplendent in army uniform like an empowered version of Tom Sharpe’s Lady Maud Lychwood and sung with vim by Emma Bell. Her physicality sent the occasional shiver down my spine, especially when she wields a sword at the May King’s coronation. Carolyn Dobbin was pertly efficient as Lady Billows’s factotum, Florence Pike (in Act 2 parading the sword, Penny Mordaunt-like). Aoife Miskelly (as the schoolma’am, Miss Wordsworth), Eddie Wade (the scoutmaster-vicar, Mr Gedge), and Superintendent Budd (a terrifically plodding turn from Andri Björn Róbertsson) combined with Upfold to provide Lady Billows’s comic foil and trusty supporters.
But the star of the show is the reluctant Albert, sung and acted with splendidly deadpan sensitivity by tenor Caspar Singh, making his ENO debut. Physically imposing as a gentle giant, Singh – who shone as Lysander in Britten’s Dream at last year’s BBC Proms – nicely caught Herring’s late-budding need for independence from his delightfully slattern Mum (Leah-Marian Jones) and a bit of adventure, which Lady Billows’s prize of 25 guineas opportunely funds. His re-entrance late in Act 3 and final scene were perfectly judged. Harewood Artist Anna Elizabeth Cooper shone as the flighty-with-a-conscience Nancy, Sid’s paramour, and mention should be made of the three mischievous children, Emmie (Abigail Sinclair), Cis (Natasha Oldbury) and Harry (Lucien Flutter), plus Ashton Hall as the Stage Manager, manually resetting the stage clock, prompting audience applause for the coronation speeches, and signalling the interval peremptorily midway through Act 2.
Applause! The cast of ENO’s Albert Herring 2025 © Genevieve Girling
Daniel Chen kept Britten’s cleverly constructed score, performed by just 14 players, moving along, pointing up the many solos while producing an authentically Brittenish sound. What a shame this highly entertaining comedy could not play for longer in both London and Manchester – Herring does not get out very often, after all – so I hope we get a re-run soon.
Albert Herring is sung in English with English surtitles. It plays for one further performance at The Coliseum, on Thursday 16 October, before transferring to The Lowry Theatre, Salford, on Tuesday 21 and and Wednesday 22 October 2025