It begins with an elderly lady alone on a black stage watching the news headlines on television, with Australia’s bushfires one of the images featured. Clearly about to die, she climbs slowly into bed and gradually disappears beneath the blanket, as her furniture is covered in funereal black drapes. It ends with a little baby alone on stage, happily playing with a toy, its unspoilt innocence glowing against the soil-stained, white stage. Yet the baby will, we know, inevitably die too at some point in the future.

In between this cycle of life, director Romeo Castellucci fills his beautiful, radical, complex, provocative staging of Mozart’s Requiem with joyous folkloric dancing, striking, surreal imagery, and blasts of colour amid the dark shadows. But however vibrant the staging becomes, extinction is always there in the background. A list called ‘Atlas of Great Extinctions’ projected onto the back wall scrolls through the names of the wildlife, human species, languages, buildings, artworks, religions and other things that have become extinct, from dinosaurs to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon...