With its hardy knights, hapless heroine, and a touch of grave robbing thrown in, Weber’s hyper-romantic Euryanthe, which premiered in Vienna in 1823, looks like the classic gothic opera. Scratch the surface, however, and what emerges is a surprisingly Freudian drama with plenty of modern resonance. In fact, Christof Loy’s thoughtful, penetrating 2018 production for Theater an den Wien makes you seriously question why the work – which has a reputation for being flawed, or simply “not working” – isn’t a mainstream repertoire piece. Yes, it’s long, and something of a slow burn, and yes it’s questionable that the title character simply comes back to life, but in Loy’s clever – and I don’t mean pretentiously arty-farty – staging you’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s imagined anyway.

The plot concerns the attempt by the envious knight Lysiart and the lovestruck maiden Eglantine to frame the virtuous Euryanthe as unfaithful while her husband Adolar is abroad at war. Loy stages it like Ibsen updated to sometime around the 1950s, Johannes Leiacker’s claustrophobic white single room set with its piano, bed and tree only missing the Chekhovian gun. The protagonists prowl around...