Our most universal experiences are births, deaths and marriages. Oh, and let’s not forget war. They are the mainstay of mythology, the news cycle and art. They bring structure to our lives – ubiquitous rites of passage celebrated and commemorated time and time again, religious or secular but almost always theatrical.

Director Imara Savage and her creative team (set and costume designer Charles Davis, lighting designer Alexander Berlage, sound designer Benjamin Carey) latch onto this idea, setting Liza Lim and Barrie Kosky’s opera The Oresteia in a hyper-realistic funeral parlour that apes the proportions of European court theatres and the rigid geometry of Carlo Galli Bibiena’s 18th-century colonnaded stage designs.

In doing so, they reflect the work’s reduction of the House of Atreus’s tangled motives to their emotional core, conjuring a liminal space in which the funeral parlour becomes an abstraction – a threshold between the secular and the divine, where the living and the dead meet in acts that are at once theatrical and ceremonial.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Oresteia 2026. Photo © Brett Boardman

During the pre-show, the performers are already on stage in mourning attire, sobbing and muttering, their repressed...