Coraline review: Bright as a button but a bit too goody two shoes

There can’t be many novels that have spawned a film, a video game, a comic book, a musical and an episode of The Simpsons, but Coraline, Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella for children, has managed it.

Quite enough adaptations, you might think, but here’s another: Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, commissioned by the Royal Opera.

Turnage doesn’t seem an obvious choice for kids’ opera. Greek, his first opera, was a gloriously abrasive, frequently foul-mouthed updating of the Oedipus myth, while the title character of his Anna Nicole (2011) was a model who married a billionaire and died of a drug overdose. There are no expletives, no drugs in Gaiman’s somewhat long-winded story, yet it must have been tricky to turn it into an opera that children would sit through. Clocking in at around 100 minutes, Turnage’s Coraline pushes at the limits. 

Rory Mullarkey’s libretto makes a few workable additions to Gaiman’s plot: young Coraline, finding life dull in her family’s new home, chances upon a doorway into another world. There she finds a mirror-image of where she’s just come from, with Other Parents who seem much more fun than those she left behind. Things are not as comfortable as they seem, as the Other Parents’ button eyes would suggest. When things turn sinister and she struggles to make her way back. 

Mullarkey’s text uses rhyme and metre to good effect but still seems simultaneously overloaded and slow-moving, allowing Turnage’s music little room to blossom. Nevertheless his orchestra, Britten Sinfonia conducted by Sian Edwards, bubbles away attractively while the vocal lines are engaging and communicative: all the singers get the words out to the audience — not always the case in contemporary opera. Mary Bevan’s Coraline is an appropriately perky tomboy, and the supporting cast is strong, notably Kitty Whately as both Mothers.

Aletta Collins’s production activates the stage with energy and some clever effects, including Giles Cadle’s set, instantaneously creating the nooks and crannies that Coraline’s two “homes” require. In the end, though, it all seems rather prim and proper, both dramatically and musically. The inevitable happy ending offers the kind of uplift parents might want for their kids but where is the unredeemed mayhem of yesteryear, with the Lords and Ladies of Misrule? Dennis the Menace and Minnie the Minx, opera needs you.

Until Saturday (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk)