The last four months have seen artists struggling to come to terms with a world where live performance has been largely out of the question and creatives have been going stir crazy in lockdown with ideas to spare but little in the way of an outlet. Credit to West Australian Opera then who have come up with something that’s both more substantial than the run-of-the-mill “living room recital” and is entirely on the money in these socially distanced times.

Chelsea Burns as Lucy and Lachlann Lawton as Ben

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911 – 2007) was once very popular indeed thanks to a series of engaging and frequently quirky pieces of musical theatre that tapped into a popular American sensibility at a time when much of 20th-century opera seemed to be veering into the realms of atonality. One-acters like The Medium and The Telephone enjoyed outings on Broadway, his first full-length opera, The Consul (1950), won him his first of two Pulitzer Prizes, and his Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) was the first American opera to be written for television and went on to become an annual festive prime-time event. On...