It has taken far too long - 13 years to be precise - for a British company to put on John Adams's first opera, one of the most important and successful of the last quarter of the 20th century. Now that ENO has taken the plunge, reviving the superb staging that Peter Sellars created for the premiere in Houston in 1987 (and which the American company brought to the Edinburgh festival a year later), all opera-goers should give thanks, and make sure they get to see what is a gripping and often wildly entertaining event, superbly realised both musically and dramatically at the Coliseum.
Nixon in China has been heard in London before - Kent Nagano conducted the LSO in a concert performance three years ago. Experiencing it in all its splendour in an opera house, however, makes the achievement of Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman seem all the more impressive. Sellars, too, played a crucial part in the work's genesis. It was he who suggested to Adams that Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972 might be the starting point for a stage work, and it was he who brought composer and librettist together. As realised by Goodman in her wonderfully fluid, vivid text, this historic event becomes the stuff of opera on the grandest scale. With its focus shifting between the public and private worlds of the protagonists, its vivid tableaux and dance episodes, it echoes the scale and scope of Don Carlos.
But Nixon has one ingredient that Verdi's masterpiece lacks. Adams may have set out to write a "heroic" opera, peopled with larger-than-life figures, but there is a wicked vein of humour running through music, text and production that pricks the pomposity of all concerned. Richard Nixon's platitudes and his transparent ambition to use the PR, pre-Watergate, to get himself re-elected for a second term, is counterpointed with the doddering Chairman Mao's endless stream of metaphors. Madame Mao and Henry Kissinger are portrayed as monsters of different kinds - she a terrifyingly cruel ideologue, he a cold and calculating schemer. Only the Chinese prime minister, Chou En-Lai, whose insomniac eloquence ends the opera, and Pat Nixon, whose contact with the ordinary people of China and her horrified reaction to t he propagandist ballet The Red Detachment of Women (outstandingly choreographed by Mark Morris) are genuinely touching, attain real human form.
All this is wonderfully captured in Adams's score; his dramatic pacing is so sure (though a couple of scenes are too long), it's hard to believe that this was his first opera. There are moments of tremendous grandeur - the touchdown of Nixon's plane is portrayed in brassy magnificence - alongside passages of highly coloured pastiche. Paul Daniel and the ENO Orchestra ensure that no element of Adams's rich tapestry is overlooked.
As always, Sellars has revived his staging personally in Adrianne Lobel's sets, tightening every detail and making the focus as sharp as possible. He does not follow all of Goodman's stage directions, but his glosses are always compellingly interesting. Crucially, too, he has worked with the cast to make every characterisation totally believable, so that there is not a caricature anywhere on stage.
The amazingly high standard of the acting is set by James Maddalena, who sang Richard Nixon at the premiere, and remains a scary lookalike. He captures every particle of the man's insecurity, his desperate efforts to keep his head up in the treacherous waters of international diplomacy. Janis Kelly brings real pathos out of Pat Nixon, and Judith Howarth real horror out of Madame Mao, while Stephen Owen's awkward, self-conscious Kissinger is closely observed. Robert Brubaker's Mao is first-rate, and David Kempster's Chou is a performance of enormous vocal and dramatic stature. The three automata-like secretaries to Mao are winningly played by Victoria Simmonds, Ethna Robinson and Rebecca de Pont Davies. It's a great company achievement with only one disappointment: too few of the words are audible. Though Adams apparently intended the voices to be electronically "enhanced", that is a mistake in the Coliseum, where amplification does the text no favours. And every detail of this remarkable work deserves to be appreciated.
• At the Coliseum, London WC2 (020-7632 8300), till June 21, and broadcast live on Radio 3 tonight.
