Glyndebourne's first production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo is a visual whirlwind that might make you forget there's an opera happening. Directed by William Kentridge with a set by Sabine Theunissen, the staging is rooted in an artist's studio and crammed with objects: ladders, chairs, sketchbooks, a mid-century desk lamp, placards shaped like oak-leaves, concertinas of coloured cardboard, big sheets of paper printed with Kentridge's own work, and an oversized metal cone used as a loudhailer. The back wall is a constant video (designed by Janus Fouché) of Kentridge's animated charcoal drawings, annotated archive documents, and fragmentary phrases that runs before the first note and never lets up.
The cumulative effect is overwhelming - especially if you try to read the surtitles. Some may find the visual busyness frustrating, its symbolism gnomic (though we remain foxed by the repeated telephones and the map of Johannesburg). A few scenes feel like the animated whirlwind compensates for a shortfall of drama from the singers. But elsewhere, the connection between stage and screen clicks: Music (who also sings Euridice's minimal lines) paints at a desk throughout, as if generating the projections. Euridice has a dancing counterpart in Roseline Wilkens, captivating onstage and spinning across the projections as an animated sketch. There's something exhilarating about a production so determined to match the Orpheus myth's own obsession with sensory overload - from music helping Orpheus into the underworld to the fact that the final catastrophe is caused by a single desperate glance. In the pit, Jonathan Cohen and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment add light and shade, providing a welcome respite for your eyes.