Messiah, Coliseum, London

Let’s feel good about ourselves. Let’s role-play the eternal values that define our humanity: family, hope, love. Ordinary people in ordinary clothes, sharing emotions. What a wonderful metaphor for that God-given thingy called life.

Except that this is Deborah Warner’s Messiah – a community play for Christmas, designed to support English National Opera’s claim to be at the vanguard of contemporary culture. A chorus dressed in grunge walks on and sings. A soprano lies in a hospital bed and sings. A tenor distributes leaflets and sings. A sweet little boy skips around diverting everyone’s attention. A couple of dancers twirl and unite. “He was despised,” induces an angst-ridden mime.

Warner’s Messiah, designed by Tom Pye and Moritz Junge and choreographed by Kim Brandstrup, is neither shocking nor uplifting. Consisting of time and space-filling stage pictures, it is too wishy-washy to stir the juices. Like Warner’s previous opera house productions, it betrays a deaf ear: she uses the fame and familiarity of Handel’s score as a soundtrack for her theatrical whims. Unlike the same composer’s Theodora, an oratorio often cited as opera-in-disguise, Messiah has no innate theatricality. Handel conceived it as a spiritual meditation, an act of faith.

A simple, abstract “enactment” might work down the road at St Martin-in-the-Fields or some similar church, but hearing Messiah a hundred times is better than seeing it once. And this Messiah has musical merits, as BBC Radio 3 listeners will discover on Christmas Day. Laurence Cummings inspires the orchestra to a performance of style, transparence and momentum. The chorus sings lustily, almost as if on holiday. Sophie Bevan, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, John Mark Ainsley and Brindley Sherratt make a fine quartet of soloists.

The music business is awash with Messiah at this time of year. It is never awash with Handel operas. Far from being a demonstration of cutting-edge culture, ENO’s Messiah suggests a crisis of confidence in its core mission. Many “Millennials” – the young public to whom ENO’s management panders – walked out at the second interval. As for the company’s loyal audience, it’s a bleak midwinter: no opera until February. (

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