★★★☆☆
It is superbly acted, artfully lit, beautifully choreographed. And that word is not too pretentious to describe how the protagonists in Glyndebourne’s new production of Debussy’s symbolist opera drift round each other, a ménage à trois whose passions ebb and flow on quicksands of infatuation and deception, evasion and jealousy.
All that is gripping, but Stefan Herheim’s staging is not for the literal-minded. “I shall never find my way out of this forest,” Golaud sings at the start. “No,” you think, “but that’s because you seem to be wandering around the organ room at Glyndebourne.”
Nor is this a production for those who, like Golaud, want clear-cut answers to reasonable questions. To Maeterlinck’s already mysterious play Debussy added three hours of ambiguously hazy harmonies,