If ever there were a staging fans of They Think It’s All Over could hoot at, this is it.For the Guelph-Ghibelline gang wars of I Capuleti e I Montecchi, the director Dominic Cooke and the designer Robert Innes Hopkins came up with an Al Capone setting in panelled wood, artfully stripped away (literally trashed in a shoot-out). Brindley Sherratt’s admirable bass suited Capellio, shouldering the blame in Bellini’s clipped ending. Finnur Bjarnason, a stylish Icelandic tenor destined for Glyndebourne, made a smooth thug of Tebaldo. Some moves looked thinly plotted, and Andrew Mayor’s Francisco underdefined (given the absence of a Nurse), but Bellini’s extraordinary extended scena for Romeo’s tombside farewells, aerated by dramatic silences, could scarcely have been more affecting. Laurels to Susan Bickley, a Romeo both passionate and melting, to Emma Bell’s slightly domineering Giulietta, and to both conductors, Mark Shanahan (Capuleti) and Robert Dean (Cos? for whom the upper strings played like heroes.The festival runs to 13 July, ‘Fortunio’ from 29 June; 01420 561 090. Offers of materials: 020-7320 5568, e-mail wasfi dial.pipex .

Susan Bickley sings the Ghost in Birtwistle’s ‘The Last Supper’ at Glyndebourne from 4 August. Just like old times. Or to be more specific, that memorable night ten years ago when the Powerhouse (as English National Opera became known) blew its fuses. David Pountney’s wickedly knowing production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is up there with David Alden’s “chainsaw” Mazeppa among evenings when the Coliseum experienced a kind of dramatic meltdown; when the right producers locked into the central nervous systems of the right pieces and intensity levels went into the red.Shostakovich’s youthful polemic was made for Pountney. The cartoonish character of his work teetering, as it so often does, on the edge of vulgarity, his sense of brinkmanship between pathos and bathos ­ these are the qualities which repeatedly wind you in a good performance/production of Lady Macbeth, and last Friday’s first night of this long-awaited revival was a corker. The Powerhouse was once again an abattoir, all steel doors, gantries, and ladders, a giant driving wheel and meat shute.

Stefanos Lazaridis’s revolving set remains a kind of sculpture to Stalin’s Soviet Industrial Revolution. Within its confines the workforce move and behave much as they do in those “Happy Proletariat” propaganda posters ­ in strict unison like the corps of some military ballet, clenched-fist salutes punctuating every action. Or you could look at it another way: animal farm after the cull.
It’s a great image of Pountney’s, this meat Symbol of death, decay, brutality. There are bloody carcasses everywhere and it’s hard to separate the dead from the living. In the midst of it all is Katerina Ismailova, the soul of resistance in Soviet womanhood for whom self-preservation is self-destruction.Visually, physically, it’s a show which perfectly complements the maliciousness of the uncompromising score, which subverts and parodies everything it touches. Again it’s the dangerous brinkmanship between pathos and bathos. The Red Army Brass Ensemble line up above Katerina’s bed of adultery (and take a bow for their pains), drunken bassoons and rude trombones do more than suggest certain bodily functions; and yet within the blink of an eye Shostakovich will unleash music of despairing seriousness and profundity ­ like the great passacaglia with which Pountney underscores a grotesque parody of the funeral for Katerina’s brutal father-in-law.