There are those who dismiss Verdi’s Il trovatore as a series of operatic clichés held together by a string of popular melodies. To them it compares unfavourably with the masterpieces composed either side of it. Both Rigoletto, a #MeToo opera if ever there was one, and La traviata with its themes of sexual independence, feel more in touch with the times.

Adele Thomas’s daring new production for the Royal Opera House, which screens in Australian cinemas in July, attempts to set the record straight by focusing on the world in which Il trovatore is actually set. Hardly a radical approach, one might think, but the results are startling.

Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto is based on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s El trovador, a 19th-century historical melodrama set in 15th-century Spain. It may be riddled with coincidences and curses, with superstitions and slaughter, but Thomas believes the opera’s medievalism is to be embraced rather than avoided. As she writes in her program note, it’s “a world in which monsters and heaven and hell are not mere concepts, they are realities in people’s lives.”