Performer: The Opera Group

This week the Linbury Studio Theatre attracted an audience of the more minute variety with its dazzling production of The Firework-Maker’s Daughter. Based on Philip Pullman’s novel, the two-act opera transported its listeners into the realms of the Far East with papery costumes, Indonesian shadow puppetry and hand-crafted pyrotechnics.

Babur in London is the latest production from pioneering opera company The Opera Group, and it provided a thought-provoking evening. A collaborative venture between British-born composer Edward Rushton and New Delhi-based librettist Jeet Thayil, the new work has already toured Switzerland, and arrived in London following dates in Basingstoke, Oxford, Leeds and Birmingham.

Two sisters, a knight, a miller, and a blind harpist. Such is the cast of Tony Harrison and Harrison Birtwistle's Bow Down, their 1977 music-theatre piece currently being toured around the UK by The Opera Group. It's an elemental, mythic piece, but also a testament to the endless capacity for novelty that old, grim folk tales like this have.