La Voix Humaine/Dido and Aeneas – review

Lesley Garrett was recently seen in a union flag dress serenading a cringing Bradley Wiggins. It's eight years since she undertook a complete stage role, which makes it all the more compelling that she should return to Opera North – the company where she began her career – in Poulenc's neurotic telephone monologue, which the composer described as "having the smell of sperm between the thighs".

Jean Cocteau's libretto specifies that the woman, known only as Elle, is seen "sprawled on a bed in a room that looks as if a murder has been committed". Aletta Collins' production opens with the soprano sitting at a mirror in a theatrical dressing room, paralysed with fear. It is possible Garrett wasn't acting at this point, but she is a very expressive performer and makes the anguish of being dumped over the course of a 40-minute phone conversation painfully clear. If there was a slight coarsening and shrillness to her tone, it felt in keeping with a woman trying to suppress rising hysteria.

Paradoxically, Collins' companion staging of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas does open with a woman sprawled on a bed in a room that looks as if a murder has been committed. Pamela Helen Stephen's sumptuously sung Queen of Carthage appears to suffer from a split personality, as there are multiple doppelgangers mirroring her movements in Collins' stylish but slightly baffling choreography. Wyn Davies's conducting is more securely divided: plush and torrid in the Poulenc; dry and spry for Purcell.

Collins can't resist dropping the slightly heavy-handed hint that Phillip Rhodes's severe-sounding Aeneas may be the same bounder who hangs up on Poulenc's Elle, though in this instance his behaviour is even more reprehensible: he doesn't even ring.