Director Polly Graham has grabbed Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti by its horns and bent it into an uproarious Irish reincarnation in Irish National Opera’s new production… It all mirrors the composer’s genius: dropping us straight into a magical trio right at the start and racing thorough the breathtaking set pieces that comprise the whole.

Originally set in Naples in the 18th century, director Polly Graham has accordingly relocated Così Fan Tutte to a Big House in Ireland circa 1914 around the start of the First World War… This context enabled director Polly Graham to interweave the opera’s original story with narratives of socialism, nationalism and feminism.

Director Polly Graham has put her own stamp on an opera that’s previously been accused of having a negative attitude to its female characters.

In a fairly crowded field, Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte has the reputation for being perhaps the most misogynistic of operas. Yet, you’d never know it from this new Irish National Opera staging, which is much to the credit of director Polly Graham.

But it must be said that Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte his Italian librettist, are clever and funny. And so is Graham… So Graham gives us the familiar stereotype of Ireland’s landed gentry to laugh at… What she examines is the way the two women have more agency than the title implies. The logical conclusion is for her to toy with the happy-ever-after ending… Meanwhile, she nails the humour.

…a daring venture with a terrific cast, though given that director Polly Graham emphasises Homer’s violence and gore, it’s not exactly all the fun of the circus. Underlining that myths should be for all time, with contemporary resonance, Ulisse is not the conquering hero returning to his Greek island home, but a war-scarred soldier returning to an American, gun-toting Ithaca.

Polly Graham’s bold production for Longborough sets the Odyssean climax in modern-day America, with a vivacious cast on top form.

One artist not afraid of tackling things differently is Polly Graham, whose new staging of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland) is also her first production as Longborough’s artistic director… Monteverdi’s masterpiece is one of the earliest operas in the repertoire that speaks directly to modern ears, and Graham capitalises on this with a staging of intense physicality.

That human drama – that sense of individuals fighting through brutality and squalor to some sort of hope – was the real journey in this Ulisse, and Graham steered it with relentless, unsparing honesty and determination.

A taut new production … Polly Graham’s new production moves the action to present-day America ****

Transposing the action to present-day America … Graham’s staging draws out the threads of trauma that run right through a story that broods on the damage human beings do to one another.

There’s a surgical precision to Graham’s direction. Her attention to detail is meticulous and in this close-quarters venue, her young cast give us television-style intimacy.

Festival artistic director Polly Graham hasn’t pulled her punches with this, her first production for Longborough. It’ll be exciting to see what comes next.

…the evening benefits immensely from the fundamentally static staging by Polly Graham which sees Orlando more as a sound installation than as an opera. Elaborate in its minimalism, the event resembles an oratorio and can be viewed as a fragmentation of the usual form, as art that consciously carries its artificiality before it.

Polly Graham’s lively and action-packed production helped to keep things moving and helped to create a vibrant theatrical event.