At least I hope I get to see the show, from whatever (disad)vantage point, before I hear too much more about what it’s like. But this week I have seen shows that have respectively benefited and suffered from the burden of expectations that have become attached to them. In the case of ENO’s Carmen , which has got almost universally critically damned, I was pleasantly surprised.

It wasn’t half as bad as I feared it was going to be, but then I had suffered the Royal Festival Hall’s embarrassing attempt to reinvigorate Oscar Hammerstein’s Broadway re-write Carmen Jones this summer, so it would have been hard for it to have been much worse.

In fact, though film director turned debutant opera director Sally Potter doesn’t maintain the narrative thrust, she frames it intriguingly in a succession of compellingly contemporary stage pictures that keep the characters under constantly electronic surveillance.

There are some odd practical decisions to keep singers behind scrims and Perspex screens that can’t be good for the sound quality they are trying to produce, but the show feels altogether more political and radical than the South Bank’s clumsy concert-like staging.