In reconceiving Joyce's great, elegiac tale of a gathering in gaslight-era Dublin, this production achieves a soft-spoken, hesitant air of intimacy that has you leaning forward like a fascinated eavesdropper.

But as every farmer knows, waste is a fertilizer; and what has grown in postwar Europe is a sense of adventure, a reconceiving of production values that is bringing young Europeans into the opera house.

Already across a wide range of different activities he points to advances in the process of 'breaking up, dissolving and methodologically as well as critically reconceiving the unitary field ruled hitherto by Orientalism, historicism, and what could be called essentialist universalism'.