Add unfussy, stylised direction from Olivia Fuchs and the singing simply took wing. And not just Romaniw and Butt Philip (though they were magnificent), or Mikhail Svetlov’s noble, conflicted King René. Even the chorus soared. I walked out feeling simultaneously harrowed and elated. Damn it all, OHP, why do you have to be so good?

Olivia Fuchs transposes the play’s and indeed the opera’s world so that the action all takes place in or around a hospital ward; but despite the familiarity of the approach, it is done with directness, passion and commitment.

...Olivia Fuchs’s staging, imaginatively designed by takis, is sensitive to all the libretto’s weird mystical implications without being pretentiously tricksy.

A triumphant finale … Olivia Fuchs’ directing of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta used the whole stage, but she handled it wisely. The blind heroine’s sanctum was on one side, just visible behind plastic curtains; the opposite side featured a structure of illuminated poles, suggesting the barrier between Iolanta’s secret garden and the outside world. Strings of bulbs represented the flowers that Iolanta cannot see – a neat touch, with the very things invisible to her illuminated for us, and visually effective as the night drew in.