Victorian Opera’s first co-commission and co-production with the Royal Opera House – an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s cult 2002 novella Coraline – has just opened at London’s Barbican to some very positive four-star reviews. The season had already sold out before opening night. The new opera will be staged in Melbourne as part of Victorian Opera’s 2019 season, full details of which will be announced in September.

Coraline is the fourth opera by British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, following Greek, his gritty retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex set in the East End of London in the 1980s, Anna Nicole (his first ROH commission) about Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, and The Silver Tassie, a drama set in Britain during the First World War.

Dominic Sedgwick, Harry Nicoll and Gillian Keith as Ghost Child 1, 2 & 3, Mary Bevan as Coraline and Kitty Whately as Other Mother. Photograph © Stephen Cumminskey

A horror fantasy for children, Coraline tells the story of a young girl on the cusp of puberty who finds a strange door in her parents’ new home, which leads to a parallel flat where she is greeted by alternate versions of her...