I thought it was going to be ‘Paint your Wagon’ meets Verdi on a dark night. I was right about the dark night. The brooding atmosphere of ‘Jacko’s Hour’ was helped by the fact it was one of those dark rainy nights than seemed to hail straight from the page of a Dickens or a Dostoevsky novel. There was a morose mysteriousness, an undertone of murderous intent in the air before I even found the labyrinthine sprawl of Bridewell Theatre after wandering lost down the dark slump of an alley teetering somewhere off Fleet Street. I ducked in out the rain and it felt about as far from the Coliseum and the Royal Opera House as one could imagine - a little bit subversive, a little bit underground and one could almost detect the ghost of chlorine in the air. (The theatre was once a Victorian pool hall). There was no list of posh benefactors and ads for posh music schools for synaesthetic snobs on the programme. The Bridewell audience was all violin-toting students and professorial types ducking in out the rain. Not a cravat in sight. For it is a truth universally acknowledged that posh people go to the opera to gawp at peasants, marsh nymphs and consumptive prostitutes. So Jacko’s Hour’s tragic strife between the Rollins and the Pierces - traveling folk in dangly earrings and vests - fits in pretty well with the operatic pantheon of the oppressed.

The inspiration for ‘Jacko’s Hour’ comes from the 1952 Western ‘High Noon’, a movie canonized in American cinematic history. Though ‘Jacko’s Hour’ is a palpably modern piece down to the pink-sequined Motorola and the insane pyromaniac hoody Craig, its heart is decidedly Western - from its set piece, ‘The Lone Star Shootin’ Range’ with luridly painted Texan landscape and its use of themes like ‘vengeance on his mind’, ‘blood in the dust’ and a ‘righteous man must stand alone.’ Most magnificently realised is of course, the ghostly Marshal Kane, who inhabits a psychological space somewhere between Fightclub and Dostoevsky.

‘Jacko’s Hour’ is the result of a collaboration between the highly talented duo of Tim Sattherthwaite and Elfyn Jones and has been a seven year journey along the not so yellow brick road to production. To finance it they produced the company Opera Engine which aims to showcase the talent of emergent young singers from conservatoires across the country. One can only respect them as grass roots full-length opera seem almost impossible to come by in an era dominated by celebrity and multi-million pound budgets. I am hopeful that Jacko’s Hour and its brace of relatively unknown singers will find homes on a larger stage than the dark confines of the Bridewell Theatre. Perhaps one could suggest a collaboration with the Coen brothers at the ENO since the ENO are currently so fond of that type of thing.

There are several strokes of genius: the opera is shadowed by the surreal shadowy presence of Marshal Kane at his gravest and darkest, oozing brooding masculine existentialism, an avatar of death and all things gravelly. (Though Henry Deacon in the role whilst indeed lovely, was not so much laconic Texan as dreamy-eyed English mystical.) The malovelent shade of Geordie Pierce, Danny Standing in the role of the violent murderer, haunting the drunken end of night is reserved for very little actual ‘on screen’ presence. Even his sidekick Craig (a wonderfully psychotic Zachary Roberts also doubling as the ghost of Jacko’s brother) gets more of a showing, playing the human equivalent of an unleashed Doberman in baritone and bling. Jacko’s Hour may be set in Leeds and have the slightly dodgy fairground accents to boot and a looming ASBO or two, but it epitomizes the reserved masculinity of the west. Amy’s ill-starred tryst with Damien is quite underplayed, even the fact that she’s pregnant (I think) is sidelined in favour of those bigger simmering themes of violence and revenge well-dramatised by Brian Smith Walters, though vocally Annabel Mountford in the role tended to dominate. Even pink velour sweat pants couldn’t dampen her charm and Flemming-esque belle-ness. The pared down piano (played by the superb Leo Nicholson) was a virtual juke box of sound – one heard grinding Tom Waits classics, Ranchera, lounge lizardry, jazzy bluesy organs and great hacking fistfuls of dissonance as high noon approached. And the percussion that marked out the progression towards doom the same way as the shots of the clocks, hands pointing towards mid day marked it out in High Noon was incredibly evocative.

Opera engine’s aim is to showcase ‘the profound humanity of the human voice’ and in this dark cavernous little space the voices really soared. Even the sextets were crystal clear and beautifully threaded together.

It’s a sign that you don’t need 6 dance troops, 4 mezzo woolly mammoths sponsored by Greenpeace and pyromaniac producers to produce good opera these days and a testament to the combined talent of Satterthwaite and Jones.