Fit for the ENO's future?

I have seen the future and it is not yet ready to work. Walking around the hard-hat site that is the Coliseum, I find it hard to imagine that it will open in three weeks time, on 21 February. The welders are still searing frames, the painters are daubing undercoats and miles of unlayed cables snake across uncovered mosaic flooring, a peril to builders' boots. "It'll be touch and go," admits Sean Doran, artistic director of English National Opera.

Reopening has already been put back a fortnight, wiping a quarter of a million pounds of planned revenue from an overstressed budget. The first half-season is built around a well- trailed Ring and sundry revivals. It will be April before the understated Doran announces a vision for the company's future and September 2005 before any of his proposed changes are seen on stage.

Revising the vision is critical, for ENO's problems are not casual, but encrusted. The company has been in a precarious state for 12 years as deficits mounted and public support waned. Six years ago, New Labour proposed a merger with Covent Garden. That outrage was resisted but the trauma of a £41 million refurbishment brought the enterprise to the brink of closure. Last summer, on a financial cliff-edge, the company faced a brutal Arts Council demand (known as "Plan B") for its disbandment. Only the fury of a united board, most of whose members had contributed generously to an £18 million public appeal, rescued Lilian Baylis's cherished legacy of popular opera in the common tongue.

Facing disaster focused minds. What, exactly, is ENO for? In past difficulties it fell back on being a Volksoper - a people's opera that is cheaper and more cheerful than the international celebrity-shuttle at Covent Garden.

That defence no longer holds. The Royal Opera House has priced itself more competitively and the public will not put up with also-sangs. ENO's secondary function, as a nursery for English singers, has been maimed by its adherence to the vernacular. Singers of real promise resent learning their repertoire in a language that is unwelcome on the world stage; recent comets - Bryn Terfel, Amanda Roocroft, Ian Bostridge - bypassed ENO on their celestial ascent. Opera in English, a shibboleth to ageing ENO supporters, is a vacant ideal in an age when seat-back surtitles make every dialect comprehensible and the decline of front-of-mouth voicetraining makes porridge of the colloquial librettos that are sung at the Coliseum. Doran talks of raising £3 million to install surtitles.

The plan which is forming in his mind blends core values with unexploited potential. Doran, 43, an Irishman who earned his spurs in Australia, sees ENO as a bastion for operas written in English: the modest opus of Britten, Purcell, Handel and Vaughan Williams. He talks of extending the scope of opera - as the National Theatre has done with Jerry Springer, and the ROH with Sweeney Todd - and treating the restored theatre as an independent asset, separate from the performing company.

The Coliseum, he argues, should be "the home of the voice", a showcase not just for operatic arias but for stars of world music and some of the more thoughtful denizens of pop. Unlike the ROH, which hires out its stage in slack time to all-comers, ENO would seek to "curate" guest acts with programmes that "stretch" the artists, or so the whimsy goes.

Certainly, Frank Matcham's Coliseum restored to a simulacrum of its 1904 magnificence will be a magnetic attraction. The architects, Nick Thompson and David Wright, have avoided the temptations of gold-leaf decor and bordello upholstery. They have revived, instead, the subdued hues of imperial confidence: brownand-cream walls, brushed-velvet purples that caress the eye, a dome that glows comfortingly with hidden backlights, family-friendly gargoyles. The auditorium has been slightly enlarged by 50 seats, to 2,400, all of them with perfect sightlines and enhanced intimacy - including the 500 star-specks that are on sale nightly at £10 each.

The bars have been enlarged and fiercely branded (one of them will be known as the Bollinger's Bar) and the number of ladies' toilets has doubled; each, for some reason, has twin loo-roll holders. The gents, once a celebrated hive of gay concupiscence, with holes in the walls that extruded weird noises, have been made puritanically respectable.

The rooftop glory is the restoration of Matcham's silver rotating ball, surrounded by naked slave boys. Those opera-goers with the puff to reach the glassed-in roof atrium will be able to feast their eyes on Nelson's Column, far below. It can lay claim to having the best view in town.