The Way Back Home, ENO, Young Vic

A Martian, a Spitfire and a flatulent penguin are the unlikely ingredients for The Way Back Home, English National Opera’s first foray into the colourful world of children’s opera. And if those don’t sound like enticement enough, be reassured, at only 45 minutes long this really is a child-friendly taster of a genre that doesn’t always get the best press when it comes to accessibility.

Amahl and the Night Visitors, L'enfant et les sortilèges, Hansel and Gretel, Where the Wild Things Are: opera for children might be a niche-of-a-niche, but over the centuries it has punched above its weight. Perhaps that’s owing to the challenges it poses, forcing composers to strip opera right back to its essence if they wants to grab (and hold onto) a new and increasingly impatient audience. Here the task falls to composer Joanna Lee and librettist Rory Mullarkey, who respond with warmth, invention and refreshingly few musical concessions.

Director Katie Mitchell makes no attempt to be cool or current, which makes the show feel that much fresher

The best children’s operas all have one thing in common: a really good source story. Lee picks a winner here with Oliver Jeffers’ contemporary classic of a picture-book The Way Back Home, adapted and extended here to fill out a (short) evening’s entertainment. A boy (Victoria Simmonds) and his penguin (Peter Hobday) discover a Spitfire in their living room and decide to take it out for a spin. Once airborne, the boy runs out of petrol and crash-lands on the moon, where he encounters a Martian (Aoife O’Sullivan) with engine-trouble. After a few narrative turns and loop-the-loops, both end up safely home, with a little hindrance from the scheming Gizmos, whose plane the boy has unwittingly stolen.

Any child familiar with the original will love how closely Vicki Mortimer’s designs mirror those of the book. Colours are primary, but the shades are rich and dark rather than predictably neon-gaudy, and props that are determinedly two-dimensional add a reassuring Lo-fi, analogue charm to proceedings. Director Katie Mitchell makes no attempt to be cool or current, which conversely makes the show feel that much fresher.

Lee’s score is all 21^st-century, however. Pitching her music somewhere between a conventional operatic score and a sequence of sound effects, she gets away with some fairly bold harmonic language. It’s the musical equivalent of concealing vegetables in a child’s dinner, and with the aid of zooming aeroplanes, oozing aliens and groaning monsters, it all slips down painlessly, and with a pleasantly onomatopoeic crunch.

Michell’s young cast gamely throw themselves into the pantomime drama, while delivering melodic lines that are not without some fairly significant challenges. O’Sullivan’s Martian is a stand-out, glorying in her mechanistic sing-song phrases. Simmonds (pictured above) – part Christopher Robin, part annoying Not Now Bernard – is energetic and engaging. Both, however, are outshone by the glorious shuffling rotundness of Hobday’s Penguin (pictured left). I suspect all children will prefer this anarchic, pugilistic, flatulent creature to the ever so slightly ghastly child, and the ending wisely celebrates this with an unexpected little coda.

The show is apparently aimed at 5-8 year-olds, but I question whether the creators didn’t miss a trick in not catering more generously to the upper end of this range. The capital’s young sophisticates can handle a lot, and sweetly engaging though the show is I wonder whether a bright seven or eight-year-old wouldn’t feel just a little short-changed by the drama.

• The Way Back Home is at The Young Vic until 23 December, 2014