English National Opera's The Pilgrim's Progess, London Coliseum

Continuing its commitment to celebrating the best of English opera, English National Opera follows its acclaimed productions of Vaughan Williams’s jovial Sir John in Love and poignant Riders to the Sea with its first-ever staging of the composer’s rapturous response to one of the best-loved adventure stories in the English language.

Premiered during the 1951 Festival of Britain, Vaughan Williams’s sublime ‘morality’ charts the trials, tribulations, temptations and revelations that Bunyan’s questing pilgrim encounters on his physical and spiritual progress ‘from this world to that which is to come’.

Staged by revered Japanese actor-director Yoshi Oïda, a veteran member of Peter Brook’s Parisian theatre company and a past master of telling simplicity, this new production is conducted by Martyn Brabbins, whose passionate belief in British music was last revealed at English National Opera in his ‘grippingly urgent and muscular’ (The Guardian) account of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time in 2005.