ENO, London Coliseum, 28 February 2014

ENO has a very strong track record where Handel is concerned and I suspect the new Richard Jones production of Rodelinda will join the ranks of challenging but convincing approaches.

We are in Milan in some amorphous present, but there is no sense at all of a country, its people or even its outside world. The characters we meet are almost entirely bound up with their own narcissistic problems; the CCTV is only used to spy on each other. When we do encounter the outside world, in some stunning designs from Jeremy Herbert, characters are alone. The huge memorial to Bertarido dwarfs the stage; the enormous neon-lit bar is empty but for the protagonist and his friend. There are few surprises as the narrative unfolds and relationships become ever tenser. They may sing of love and desire, but violence is ever present and the brilliant reversal of the final scene – all compassion in the language, but increasingly vicious in action – is fully justified by all we have seen before.

It is uniformly well sung, often brilliantly so, with Rebecca Evans’ Rodelinda moving towards Lady Macbeth in her single-minded search for vengeance, her husband, Bertarido, giving Iestyn Davies one of his finest characterisations, as a man moving from compassion to vengeance. John Mark Ainsley made Grimoaldo a more complex character than he appears from the libretto, at odds with the action he has led himself into and yet potential more honourable than Bertarido. Susan Bickley’s Eduige is a pragmatist who loses out in the end. In this world of nasty individuals only the fixer, Garibaldo, actually gets killed, but the one honest man, Christopher Ainslie’s finely crafted Unulfo, is not only butchered near to death by the ‘hero’ but is totally ignored in his pain as the victors grab the spoils. It is a challenging but convincing approach which I hope will be revived.

Christian Curnyn keeps a tight rein on his forces in the pit, who played with panache, but could surely have been raised for greater impact?

There are six more performances between now and 15 March.