Laughing with the Trojans

For Berlioz there was no doubt as to the where, what and essence of Troy.

It lived in his molten imagination via Homer and Virgil, feeding what he called his, epic afflictions and resulting in the five-act masterpiece for which he shaped his own libretto.

The Trojans, long dismissed as a French white elephant born of a curate's egg, is earning its rightful place in the operatic repertoire.

For Richard Jones, director of ENO's first staging of the work - cautiously mounted in two parts, the second of which is in May - Troy is here and today. Stripped of the nobility that so appealed to Berlioz, only bloodshed and terrorism remain. The sight of baseball caps and Bermuda shorts, as sure a cliche for the real world as doilies for gentility, always raises alarm bells.

Here were the citizens of Troy in home clothes, now jogging round the fuselage of a wrecked plane, now bearing witness (if that's what they were doing as they bobbed up and down) from the green plastic seats of a sports stadium, now enacting what in Red China would surely have been called the Dance of the Badly Dressed, a kind of gym routine.

American iconography dominated (this is a coproduction with San Francisco).

The Jackie-like appearance of Hector's widow Andromache, together with a filmed sequence so complicated you forgot the music (what a film composer Berlioz would have made), reminded us of Kennedy's assassination. And yes, there were skyscraper towers, not quite twin but as good as, and, yes, white dust.

Much of this was hugely irritating and, in act one, desperately slow, not helped by a strangely unthrilling performance by the singers and orchestra despite Paul Daniel's incisive conducting.

By act two, however, this ingenious score, with offstage bands, vast orchestra, massive chorus, began to catch fire. The arrival onstage of John Daszak's ardent Aeneas (in a suit) marked a musical turning point, bringing out the best both in Susan Bickley's raw, desperate Cassandra (did she have to be dressed as a headmistress?) and in the threatened ENO chorus. Robert Poulton, as Chorebus, never quite got into his stride.

Jones, as his infuriating but effective ROH Ring demonstrated, is one of the most penetrating of all directors. He hasn't convinced me this is the way to do the Trojans but I can stand being provoked. This is alienation by banality and commonplace, a hard way to project an epic. The split of boos and cheers suggests he has worked his usual disquieting spell.

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The Trojans Part 1: The Capture Of Troy