Owen Wingrave

The ghosts of Owen Wingrave's ancestors assemble – all of them part of a proud military tradition which Owen is about to destroy by rejecting a life of soldiering. They snap to attention on the first beat of the opera. It's an entirely appropriate gesture for a production that holds an extrordinary tension throughout – a clarity of moral purpose in the agitated battleground of social expectation and conscientious objection.

In this sparse staging, we see almost all of the King's Theatre's cavernous stage. Crucially, however, almost all of the singing is delivered from a small area downstage centre, to great effect. It gives a clarity to the singing, and a pinpoint focus to issues of immense scale. Britten's music sets aborted attemts at jaunty military fanfares against angular serialist melodies and sparse, violent percussion. Under the baton of Mark Wigglesworth, the Britten-Pears orchestra absolutely maintain this tension. They give words like "charity", "glory" and "pride" the full musical weighting they deserve. They delight in the grotesque melodies which accompany (in particular) the female characters' bizarre received wisdom around the glories of war.

At moments, Owen Wingrave feels a little heavy-handed. In a year which marks the centenary of the First World War, the pro-peace message is an obvious one to dwell upon. The character of Leachmere, in particular, gets a raw deal from Myfanwy Piper's libretto – though Isaiah Bell does well to bring out the young officer's vulnerability, making him less of the war-hungry cartoon toff he could be. But Owen Wingrave is a far cry from an earnest eulogy and even further from the comfortable homilies about "supporting our boys". "Peace is not lazy, but vigilant," sings Wingrave and, indeed, what seems a simple moral choice is fraught with difficulty here. So, Mr Coyle the teacher of miliary strategy (and Wingrave's most sympathetic ear) pleads with us as he tries to justify the propriety of his training and sending of boys off to fight. It's classic Henry James – a truth of self-evident simplicity cranked up to psychologically unbearable levels of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the ghosts representing dead ancestors, dressed in modern milliary uniform, glare at us powerfully and accusatively. Who are we to denigrate their memory if we haven't the courage to fight, right?