The greengrocer’s tale: Britten’s ‘Albert Herring’ at ENO

The narrow-minded Suffolk village setting in Benjamin Britten’s only comic opera makes it a counterpoint to his Peter Grimes from two years earlier, but this is very different. Its plot is based on a Guy de Maupassant short story where the absence of a suitable girl as Rose Queen prompts the village matriarch to crown a Rose King, who then uses the prize money to slum it in Paris where he goes off the rails. Britten’s librettist Eric Crozier transfers the story to a market town named Loxford in Suffolk, creating a glorious critique of small town mentality, pomposity and sexual repression, but with a happy ending. Since the local bigwig Lady Billows and her housekeeper Florence Pike find a moral imperfection in every nominee, they decide on a May King instead, and compel the blamelessly chaste greengrocer Albert Herring to take the role. Then, with 25 sovereigns of prize money in his pocket, he disappears.

His May crown is found crushed by the side of the road, and the nine-person threnody in Act III when they imagine him dead and gone is a vocal highlight. The musical tapestry of this opera, woven by 13 instrumentalists and roughly the same number of singers, was brought fully to life under the excellent baton of the young Daniel Cohen. As Music Director of the Staatstheater Darmstadt since 2018, he has served up a musical treat, in a semi-staged production directed and designed by Antony McDonald. Although it’s a comedy, Britten insisted it must not be played for laughs. McDonald almost follows this dictum, but can’t resist the occasional nudge towards sexual allusion, such as a scoutmaster inclined to pederasty, and the butcher’s assistant Sid to bisexuality.

One problem of singing opera in English, which they always do at the ENO, is diction, and Mr Gedge the vicar (Eddie Wade), Mr Upfold the mayor (Mark Le Brocq) and Superintendent Budd (Andri Björn Róbertsson) were all excellent in this respect, as was the butcher’s assistant Sid (Dan D’Souza). He and his girlfriend Nancy (Anna Elizabeth Cooper) from the bakery, are instrumental in leading Albert astray by spiking his lemonade with a good dose of rum.

Fine support from the rest of the cast, with Leah Marian-Jones as a suitably robust Mrs Herring, but Emma Bell disappointingly shouty as Lady Billows, and Carolyn Dobbin an unusually young Florence Pike (one anticipates the two women as being of an age with one another). As Albert Herring himself, Caspar Singh appeared rather more knowing and shrewd than the semi-autistic mother’s boy he can sometimes be, but this was the director’s choice not the singer’s, and again the diction required glances at the surtitles.

They are only doing two performances at the English National Opera, the next on 16 October, before it moves to the Lowry Theatre in Salford. So if you are in or near London this is worth booking straight away.

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