Despite Lindsay Posner’s old-fashioned production I was enchanted by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s bitter-sweet musical fantasy about missed life-chances in a 1870s New England village.

The climactic scene, when Jeremiah James’s emotionally disturbed barker, Billy Bigelow, returns from Heaven’s “waiting-room” for one last day on earth, strikes notes of overwhelming pathos. Carousel conveys a painful sense of the might-have-been for Bigelow and the wife and daughter he left behind, had they all not been victims of precarious, economic times.

Yet Nicholas Hytner’s famous National Theatre revival in 1992 far more than Posner’s romanticising, well-sung production, pierced to the show’s heart of darkness, stressing what an ambivalent picture Carousel paints of a just industrialised America.

Alexandra Silber’s mill-girl Julie Jordan and the swaggering girl-magnet, the eventually suicidal Bigelow, lead lives of chronic insecurity. By contrast Julie’s friend, Lauren Hood’s Carrie Pipperidge and the unappealing fisherman Enoch turn out life-winners. As the smug local doctor puts it, recommending American individuality. “Happiness? You’ve got to find it for yourself.”

That wonderful designer, William Dudley, initially summons up a fairground carousel that looks unprettily low-rent, with kids and loquacious townfolk gambolling around with fixed, beatific smirks of the sort that people only wear in musicals. Then, though, Dudley’s vivid back-projections offer ocean views, ships sailing and, with thrilling illusionary deftness, the spectacle of Billy ascending to heaven’s “back-yard”.

The vitality of the staging, especially the sexy athleticism and elegance of Adam Cooper’s exciting choreography, is not always matched by performance. But Silber as the unlucky heroine boasts a star-is-born quality of absolute naturalness, though she, like others, sometimes sounds and sings as if from England UK rather than New England. Silber impressively lives up to the accusation “You’re a queer one, Julie Jordan” making the girl an unsophisticated, shy and heart-felt exception to the prevailing mood of boisterous jollity. This Julie succumbs to James’s emotionally under-par Billy, to a brief marriage of violence, bullying and a thieving mission that goes wrong, thanks to Graham MacDuff’s Jigger, a charismatic wit of a villain in a shady hat and matching manner. She declines in poignant stages.

As Julie kneels by her moribund husband, Lesley Garrett’s Nettie Fowler launches into a full-throated warbling version of You’ll Never Walk Alone. Silber’s wonderful performance clashes stylistically with Miss Garrett’s gross, music-hall Nettie who busts out all over the stage like a flirtatious maiden aunt on a purple hearts’ bender. She waggles her voice, jiggles her elbows, mouth, hips, shoulders — oh every famous part of her — in a gross parody of high spirits, as if intent upon mass audience seduction. Lauren Hood’s pink-dressed Carrie, taking cues from this winsomely artificial performer, follows suit.

This duo do not, however, detract from Carousel’s impact. What a shattering impression James and Silber make, after the dead Billy returns to earth and realises his daughter is following in his unhappy footsteps. “I let my golden chances pass me by,” he sadly sings and returns to heaven, half his life lost. An experience to cherish.