Skelton says life is a journey Davy says it is a race Bess says it is a dance

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Skelton says life is a journey; Davy says it is a race; Bess says it is a dance. Under Alan Burrett's lighting this becomes by turns a skating lake, a swamp and a river. Even so the play's allegorical weight becomes hard to bear, not least because the work contradicts itself in both style and substance. Acquiring a new wife on the way, he and his band battle on.They traverse an horrific, symbolic landscape brilliantly realised in Stephen Brimson-Lewis's design, with its glass floor where the dismembered dead are buried like specimens in a case. The Wars of the Roses pauses to gasp for breath, and Mallory, a saddened captain, sets off for home. His companions are the reluctant survivor Skelton, Davy, a mercenary boy, Bess who knows the world is too weary for her hard-bitten wisdom, and later Kell, a priest who has defrocked himself.Although the home and family Mallory abandoned have been destroyed, Mallory continues what becomes a metaphorical quest in which home becomes "Home". Thus Christ steps off a crucifix to kvetch about his father, and Skelton, who longs for death, rails against the spring: "All that renewal." Barnes's model tone, and imagery, draws upon the sardonic grotesquerie of Brueghel and Bosch and this new play is set in the apocalyptic closure of the Middle Ages, specifically after the Battle of Tewkesbury, 1471.

DREAMING BEGINS with cannonfire: Boom Boom. Later: "There's a fly in my soup." "I'll get a spider." Boom Boom This is the kind of juxtaposition Peter Barnes loves. Irreverence is his trustiest weapon, and, as the lead character Mallory says, "nothing is sacred or powerful unless you make it so". Here, in music dominated by Alison Smart's Mary Magdalene, and the Tippett-like radiance of Christ's closing monologue, the crux of the story was apparent: physical regeneration not dreamed of in heaven, but occurring somewhere downstairs in our reality.Whether or not your disbelief was willingly suspended, the ending was impressive: a final blessing, then echoing fanfares from trombones, horns and tuba processing through the audience and outside, via church doors flung open to the four winds, the four elements, and the four imagined corners of the world..

Tightly controlled, the drama, which existed as much in the pauses and violent dissolves between scenes as within them, was cumulative, resolving itself into the final episode, "The Resurrection Garden". Urgent telegraphic paraphrases of events in sung dialogue preceded no less pungently elliptical depictions of events set in terms of instrumental music. These latter, that of the seizing and binding of Christ, for example, were late-Stravinskian in flavour, feral bundles of biting and scratching solo strings set at odds with one another in registral extremes.In contrast, the evening's other characteristic sound was that of the musical "halo", whether of delicate violin harmonics enrobing the majestic voice of Stuart McIntyre's Jesus, or the shining organ clusters that accompanied the congregational singing of the plainsong hymns Pange Lingua and Vexilla Regis.If Judas was for Elgar the figure of human interest in The Apostles, then for Harvey in Passion and Resurrection, it was Pilate who assumed a rounded dimension, in so far as the schematic form allowed. Top marks, none the less, to those valiant upholders of contemporary music, Sinfonia 21, for daring to programme a modern account of the Passion, Harvey's religious drama, Passion and Resurrection, written in 1981, and predating the revivalist mood of more recent works by so-called "faith minimalist" composers. Passion and Resurrection began with the simplest of liturgical material: part of the communion rite from the Book of Common Prayer, "do this in remembrance of me", sung in John Merbecke's 16th-century setting by members of the BBC Singers, conducted by Martin Neary.The 11 sections that flowed from this opening each followed the pattern of scene and interlude. Easter, after all, is the essential Christian festival, and what with the re-paganisation of Christmas into a mid-winter orgy, perhaps the only one that remains uniquely spiritual in its concern with the full meaning of the Incarnation. At this time of year, choirs and orchestras need no excuse to tell out the myth as superbly recounted in Handel's Messiah or the Bach Passions.