In Henry Purcell’s day, the late 17th century, The Fairy Queen was a set of delectable songs and airs inserted into adapted bits from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Made for a long night.

Netia Jones’s production for Pinchgut Opera establishes from the outset that her Fairy Queen will not be this.

Jones jettisons the spoken text and mines the libretto of Purcell’s so-called semi-opera for ideas that resonate today, an approach elegantly indicated by the projected title at the start of the show.

The words are seen with their mirror image below: The Fairy Queen is the thing and also its reflection.

The Orchestra of the Antipodes lavishes loving attention and immaculate period style on Handel’s masques, which here are the impetus for a series of loosely connected tales of love, loss, adventure and transformation in a 21st-century city. 

Those who know A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and it would be hard to find someone who doesn’t – will feel its distant spirit hovering delicately over The Fairy Queen and will revel in the connections Jones makes.