For the second part of his Opera Australia Mozart trilogy, Sir David McVicar ups the dramatic stakes by taking The Marriage of Figaro back to basics, revealing a melting pot of danger, sex and isolation beneath the comic surface of a world that feels terrifyingly authentic. Although we tend to think of Beaumarchais’ play and the opera that came out of it played in costumes from the era of the French Revolution, as McVicar pointed out recently that was never the case in Mozart’s time, and by setting his staging in the 1640s he skilfully heightens the tension in a downtrodden household struggling to live out its life under the thumb of the autocratic Count Almaviva. In other words, although it’s often very funny, the comedy can turn exceedingly dark at the drop of a hat.

As always, the canny British director creates an entirely credible milieu within which his characters exist, in this case emphasising an upstairs downstairs world where there’s likely to be a servant (or possibly four) listening at every door and the wannabe middle-classes, men like Bartolo and Basilio, feed off those at the...