English National Opera is still on a high despite a disappointing La Bohème from Jonathan Miller a few weeks ago. Its relationship with Sky continues to bring productions to a large television audience.

Katie Mitchell is set to bring another multi-media project to the Young Vic in April. Box office is booming.

And ENO captures the zeitgeist once again by bringing John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic to the British stage for the first time. The director is Penny Woolcock, who filmed Adams’s Death Of Klinghoffer for television, and her production is shared with the New York Met — further evidence that ENO is now in the big league.  

Doctor Atomic grapples, as Adams often does, with contemporary moral issues, in this case the creation and unleashing of the atomic bomb in 1945.

The text, by Peter Sellars, also responsible for the first production in San Francisco, collates information from various sources: declassified US government documents, technical manuals and personal memoirs of scientists and military personnel, as well as fragments of Baudelaire, John Donne and the Bhagavad Gita.

The scientific material is a problem. Not even John Adams can make phrases like “interwoven with the twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron” sound convincing, and in truth there’s too much banal conversation set to unlyrical, unmemorable music. 

Fortunately that’s only part of the story. The poetry was appreciated by the formidably cultured physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, who masterminded the so-called Manhattan Project, and it provides welcome relief from those neutron chains. Indeed, one of the finest passages sets Donne’s Batter My Heart to a poignant Elizabethan-style lament: verse and music fuse to express the pangs of conscience.

Gerald Finley is magnificent here and throughout as the tortured Oppenheimer. Brindley Sherratt and Jonathan Veira as Edward Teller and General Groves are the other stars in a strong cast.
Adams’s score blossoms where the text is poetic, but it’s also impressive where he’s on familiar ground: those metallic shards of sound, the flickering highlights, the nervous, jabbing rhythms all cohere into an exhilarating whole.

Given that the entire work leads up to the catastrophic explosion, the tension is maintained superbly — thanks also to Lawrence Renes’s well-paced conducting of the first-rate orchestral and choral forces. More surprisingly, the overall effect is oddly hypnotic.

Woolcock’s imaginative production handles the native American and Japanese elements skilfully, their resonances picked up in Julian Crouch’s admirable set designs. The climactic explosion, heralded by an extraordinary passage of frozen time — vintage Adams — cleverly avoids cliché: we see not the mushroom cloud but the effect on the witnesses. 

Were these gifted physicists saviours of the civilised world or mass murderers? The savage beauty of Adams’s score and Woolcock’s persuasive production leave the question open.
Runs to 20 March. Box office
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