How does a reviewer do justice to the difference between a performance that is excellent in every respect and one that he knows he will remember for the rest of his life? I pose the question because these performances fell emphatically into the second category.

As far as I know, director Jonny Danciger broke new ground in this production: taking his cue from Catherine Storr’s 1958 novel Marianne Dreams, he refracts the opera through the memory and imagination of the traumatised surviving child, Flora.

The first thing we think of when we see the stark and disorienting set is early German Expressionist cinema: the house’s façade is split in two by a central tunnel, a passage into darkness, its floor steeply raked, defying the laws of perspective, from which Quint and Miss Jessel emanate into the children’s lives. But it isn’t long before we realise that the house – in fact, everything we see – is as it has been drawn by Flora, down to such details as the clothing worn by Quint and Mrs Grose.

The production bristled with telling detail: when, for example, the children sing Lavender’s blue, at the line You shall be Queen Miles dubbed Flora lightly on each shoulder with a (presumably) toy sword – it looked pretty real – and then mimed cutting her throat. Flora’s doll becomes her totem, pulled between Miss Jessel and the Governess; in Act II the children enact its burial with blasphemous mock-seriousness.

A very remarkable evening. Almost forty years ago the original production of Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus had a handful of performances at English National Opera and then disappeared into opera folklore, leaving indelible memories in the minds of those of us who experienced it. Perhaps something similar will be true of this production. I wish fervently that many others might have the chance to see it: but its reputation is secure in the minds of those of us who did.

Chris Kettle, Seen & Heard International (read the full review here)