Disconcerting news from Powys: the joint founder and music director of Mid Wales Opera, the excellent Keith Darlington, is hanging up his baton. MWO is reportedly looking for a new maestro, but it will surely be hard for them to find one as invigorating. Back in 2006 I heard Darlington lead the small company orchestra in a wonderfully sprightly Bartered Bride; this year he pumps real Parisian passion into a reduced arrangement of Offenbach’s great opera.

Hoffmann is a big ask for MWO, but then the director Tim Hopkins has a big idea. In the programme he notes that the opera’s inebriated writer-hero is a “man trapped inside his own biography”. Accordingly, Anthony Baker’s abstract designs put this rather 21st-century Hoffmann (Christopher Steele) at the centre of his own scribblings and not in a Montmartre garrett. Indeed, if 19th-century Paris does invade his life, it’s very much that way round: rather like the writer-hero of Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, this author has unwittingly jumped into his own back catalogue, and he knows just how miserably these stories end.

That’s a clever concept, but it’s a dangerous one. Yes, Hopkins rightly stresses the central relationship between Hoffmann and his muse, Nicklaus (the superb Carolyn Dobbin). It’s she who’s the stage manager as Hoffmann recounts his battles with four grotesque villains (Dean Robinson) and four alluring lovers (Catherine May), and her rather cruel message is that it’s all been worth it because it makes a great story — even if, back in the present, there’s a real, ordinary girl who could actually be the One. Welcome to the terrible plight of the artist.

But Hopkins, whose overcerebral Golden Cockerel for the Royal Opera back in 1998 took a few of the same wrong turnings, should really think about lightening up. Stress the pure artificiality of these “tales” and you lose the fun and the fantasy. You also don’t let the hero grow and develop if all his experiences are simply being remembered rather than actually lived.

On the first night, Steele’s rather harried tenor met a rather harried portrayal in sore need of some drunken charisma. The two other principals, Robinson and May, face the same challenge: Robinson’s murky bass could be more acutely deployed; May’s turn in four wildly different parts fares best when she’s the vulnerable, lyrical Antonia, though her fearless stab at the coloratura heights of the doll, Olympia, deserves plaudits.

The three principals are double-cast during the autumn tour, but whoever you get, you can be sure the show will tighten up. Right now it’s performed with conviction, conducted with panache and definitely worth a visit.

Tonight: 01686 625007. Then touring: www.midwalesopera.co.uk

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