The Handmaid's Tale, Coliseum, London

A timely triumph for the ENO

If a week is a long time in politics, 20 years must seem an age's difference in prospect. For Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, 2005 became the year in which a right-wing fundamentalist takeover of the USA led one of its dissident "handmaids'', childbearers to high-ranking officials in the new Republic of Gilead, to record her pre-revolutionary history and subsequent exploitation and struggles. Yet with hindsight, this now seems an all-too appropriate time for artists to issue these warnings about man's inhumanity to man, and particularly to woman.

The Danish composer Poul Ruders and his English librettist, Paul Bentley, doubtless already found plenty of parallels in the mid-1990s when they embarked on their operatic version of The Handmaid's Tale, premiered, in Danish, in Copenhagen three years ago. But they kept their heads – as well as revealing their hearts to be – very much in the right place, by constructing a brilliantly theatrical reworking of Atwood's polemical monologue of speculative fiction.

The resulting two acts, plus lengthy prelude, do not merely transform her loose-limbed story into vivid, multi-layered and symmetrically ordered action, but do it with an inevitability and a cumulative power that must have some librettists chewing the carpet with envy.

Phyllida Lloyd re-stages her original production – in Peter Mckintosh's spare, malleable hospital-white sets, complete with revolving stage and colour-coded costumes – with a clever eye for detail and an even cleverer ear for the essential musicality of the opera's unfolding.

Ruders' music, too, is a stunningly successful example of how a strongly original voice can be maintained while eclecticism is turned to dramatically meaningful ends. Much has rightly been made of this composer's memorable way with a vocal line, heard to most obvious yet uncannily new-minted effect in the heroine Offred's extraordinary duet with her own double in Act II. Much also of his striking use of a large orchestra, resplendent with accoutrements.

Yet what perhaps struck me most at the opera's British premiere, efficiently conducted by Elgar Howarth, was the variety of ways in which modal melody displaces searing dissonance, or gospel and dance tunes, Bach or minimalist gestures give way to a whole host of remarkably unhackneyed materials.

Perhaps, among the usually deft recycling of leitmotifs, the tune of "Amazing Grace" is used too often. And perhaps there's a little too much hysteria from those rampant female voices. However, the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Marshall sang beautifully and pliantly as Offred, creating an affecting central character. Helen Field, as the coloratura teacher Aunt Lydia, was even more ardent and no less believable.

It's rare that a composer articulates a drama of ideas with as pungent a smell of greasepaint as Ruders has here. The Handmaid's Tale is the triumph that English National Opera badly needs right now.

KEITH POTTER

To 2 May (020-7632 8300)