Stark vision

English Touring Opera’s spring tour reached Cambridge the week after the undergraduates left for the Easter vacation, and, though I realise that enthusiasm for opera among students is fairly uncommon, I think there would have been enough curious ones to make the Arts Theatre less bleakly empty than it was for the second performance of Janacek’s great Jenufa, which, together with Tosca, is being taken to 16 locations over a couple of months. Notwithstanding the rows of unoccupied seats, the performance was of the no-holds-barred kind that the work demands, but that must be quite difficult to deliver to order. It was oddly under-directed by the company’s general director James Conway, who is capable of searching and helpful productions, but here left the cast to get on with it, or possibly despaired of getting them to act convincingly. Michael Vale’s sets, necessarily minimal, aren’t evocative either: there’s a big mill wheel in Act I, but in defiance of the music it doesn’t revolve.