John Adams’s opera is having its UK premiere at ENO, and the London critics, like many of their American colleagues, find fault with Peter Sellars’s libretto. Rupert Christiansen puts it most starkly: “[It] makes for a peculiarly inert plot, with all the corny ‘countdown’ tension of a rotten episode of Star Trek… and dramatis personae who remain flat figures, lumbered with unshaped words that they seem to recite rather than embody.” Not all critics agree on how much this problem matters, though, and they mostly like Adams’s score.