Mention the name Lesley Garrett and you will get a variety of responses. But at least you will get one. Everyone knows her: she has done that many crossovers.

Just as the opera world had more or less given up hope of ever seeing her again, she confounds the lot of us and returns to her roots, both Yorkshire and operatic. And how! She has taken on the exacting role of Elle in Poulenc’s telephonic monodrama.

Cocteau’s one-hander has a middle-aged woman on the phone to her ex-lover, who is about to marry another woman. She knows she is on a hiding to nothing, but she perseveres through a series of crossed lines and wrong numbers, hoping against hope to win him back. Poulenc’s score reflects her gradual disintegration.

Garrett’s theatrical prowess is riveting. In Aletta Collins’s production, with set design by Giles Cadle, she begins facing the audience at her dressing table, in a Marilyn Monroe wig. As the conversation widens, we are taken into her studio apartment, with her enlarged table now facing upstage. Hallucinating, she sees her lover through its mirror five times.

With impeccable diction, in Richard Stokes’s translation, Garrett shows us every facet of a desperate personality clutching at straws. She is also in fluent voice, emphasizing what a fine singing actress she is. Let’s hope this heralds more returns to opera.

Purcell’s Dido is another tale of abandoned womanhood. Her early capitulation into the arms of Aeneas is sadly misplaced, as he leaves her on a slight pretext engineered by a sorceress and her witches. She, too, dies of a broken heart.

Here, Collins lets her imagination run a little too free. It is one thing to keep the chorus, whether courtiers, sailors or cupids, off the stage, singing in the pit (which in turn obviates the need for any of Purcell’s formal dances). It is quite another to have Dido shadowed by the sorceress, the three witches and another three non-singing dancers, all aping her movements and wearing the same long auburn wigs, with scarlet dresses or black slips.

No doubt these are her personal demons, even multiple alter egos. But their constant presence becomes tedious, and undermines the loneliness of her predicament. They also distract from the music.

Pamela Helen Stephen distils a touching Dido, if with slightly more vibrato than is nowadays conventional. Amy Freston is her reliable Belinda, phrasing intelligently (though unaccountably absent at Dido’s death).

Phillip Rhodes’s firm baritone just keeps Aeneas from becoming the usual wimp.

Heather Shipp is a sinuous Sorceress. Wyn Davies’s orchestra makes a very passable stab at an authentic sound, including particularly deft continuo.