Just a few nights ago, Anne-Louise Sarks, Artistic Director of Melbourne Theatre Company, presented her new production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

With barely time to draw breath, she’s now plunged into directing Opera Australia’s Breaking the Waves, US composer Missy Mazzoli’s adaptation of one of the 1990s’ most memorable films.

Opera Australia: Breaking the Waves. Image supplied

“Apart from the total lack of sleep, I’m actually enjoying the change of gear,” says Sarks. “Opera is such a wonderful world to step into. You are enveloped. That’s the key difference between theatre and opera to me; there’s this other big thing in the room – the music – that I can trust and in which the performers can trust.”

Released in 1996 and directed by the Danish auteur Lars Von Trier, Breaking the Waves was divisive in its day and remains so. Set in a bleak imagining of 1970s Scotland, it tells the story of Bess, an impressionable, profoundly religious young woman who is wooed by a handsome oil rig worker, Jan. They fall in love and, once Bess has secured permission from the elders of...