The bland, standard musical-theatre singing voice would be of no avail here. The Roger Daltrey bellow is what’s required, and delivered, in this staging of Pete Townshend’s 1973 work. Unlike Franc Roddam’s film, which used the album as a soundtrack, Tom Critchley’s stage version merits the term “rock opera”, being entirely sung. The songs from Quadrophenia proper are augmented by a clutch of other Who tracks including both sides of their first single, as the High Numbers; this smacks partly of overkill, but more simply of rampant commercialism. (On a sequence of Who classics in Act One, Kevin Wathen’s vocals also go beyond Daltrey territory into a Tom Waits/death-metal gutturalism.)

Elsewhere, Townshend’s vision is treated with too much reverence. It is acknowledged both that he misunderstood the nature of schizophrenia and that the division of protagonist Jimmy into four facets (a hangover from an earlier, uncompleted musical autobiography of the band) never really took firm shape; it is therefore pointless to have four Jimmys constantly onstage, and still more irrational to give first-among-equals status to Ryan O’Donnell as “Jimmy the romantic” (supposedly based on John Entwistle, of all people). But in this tale of a young Mod’s disillusionment with all the structures around him – family, fashion, music – and his near-self-destruction, Jimmy’s love for The Girl is given exaggerated prominence. The ending of the work, with “Love, Reign O’er Me”, has always been ambivalent at best, but here it assumes a dimension of desperation in its use as something approaching the mandatory glittery, affirmative final-curtain moment.

That said, no aspect of the show is sold short (except Sophie Khan’s set design, all bare stage and gantries). The band deliver tonal complexity and rock drive, with Steffan Iestyn Jones and Greg Pringle forming a rhythm section that can stand comparison with Entwistle and Keith Moon. If we weren’t exactly re-enacting the 1960s beach battles between Mods and Rockers (which no doubt led to the choice of Brighton as the location for the press performance), there were certainly a number of middle-aged theatregoers who were volubly glad they hadn’t died before they got old. ★★★☆☆