Snappy, snazzy but where is the fear factor?

Effigies of Wickedness ENO, Gate Theatre ★★★★★

This starts off so promisingly: a small-scale show devoted to songs that fell foul of the Nazis, performed in the magical cave that serves as the Gate Theatre’s auditorium above a pub in Notting Hill. The set designed by Ellan Parry is rather wonderful, too.

Four characterful and accomplished singers – the classically trained baritone Peter Brathwaite (who originated the show’s concept) – mezzo-soprano Katie Bray, Edinburgh Fringe sensation Lucy Mccormick and the amiably bearded drag queen Le Gateau Chocolat – are accompanied by a trio of excellent musicians. English National Opera co-produces and lends expertise. Snappy and snazzy English translations by Seiriol Davies seem to roll fluently off the tunes.

But something has gone wrong in the execution. Ellen Mcdougall’s staging, developed in collaboration with Christopher Green, is just too chummy and cosy – gemütlich, as the Germans put it. With the performers elaborately costumed and the stagecraft over-egged, the atmosphere is closer to that of provincial panto than a seedy backstreet dive in Berlin.

A light, humorous commentary links attractive romantic songs by composers such as Friedrich Holländer and Mischa Spoliansky, but because we are told so little about oppression and censorship under the Third Reich, there is never any sense of why the Nazis took offence.

Only later does the temperature rise slightly, as Mccormick sings Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s dialogue between a doctor and a woman in need of an abortion and Brathwaite gives a rousing account of the same poet and composer’s Solidarity Song, which suddenly fades into disarming nothingness. Bray is splendid too in

The Ballad of Marie Sanders, but overall the whole confection is too sugar-coated and short of the ingredients of urgency, protest, fear and anger that underlie this music.

Until June 9. Tickets: 020 7229 0706; gatetheatre.co.uk or eno.org