We’re all poor little things when all is said, sung and done: that is the message of Pelléas et Mélisande. To cut through the dark forest of symbolism and find the compassion at the heart of Debussy’s opera you have to come in close. And that is exactly what Independent Opera has done.

The orchestral undergrowth has been cleared by Stephen McNeff, in his translucent, yet entirely Debussyan, new orchestration for just 35 instruments. And, in the tiny space of the Lilian Baylis Theatre, Alessandro Talevi has devised a production that pares down the psychological implications of Maeterlinck’s words and Debussy’s score to almost Strindbergian bare bones.

In Madeleine Boyd’s design, three levels of dark walkways are framed by cardboard cut-outs from Toulouse-Lautrec. And the characters emerge from a fractured Art Nouveau demi-world into the great gaping nowhere of the kingdom of Allemonde. The Middle Ages give way to an uneasy Victorian milieu, suffocating and alienating the human spirit.

None of this is in the least didactic. Responses seem to drift up from the score itself, passionately conducted by Dominic Wheeler, and from the minutely observed body language of Talevi’s stagecraft. The orchestra is glimpsed through the gaps between the walkways: the three levels are used eloquently to express loss, tenderness and brutality, fear and domination. Hand-operated pulleys, as in a period theatre, enable Julie Pasturaud’s Geneviève and the wheelchair-bound Arkel, sung in dark and beautifully sustained French by Frédéric Bourreau, to glide in from the shadows.

Ingrid Perruche is an intensely yet simply sung pre-Raphaelite beauty of a Mélisande, lost in an isolation intruded upon by both the sweetness and strength of Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy’s superbly sung Pelléas, and by the locked-in fear of Andrew Foster- Williams’s Golaud — apparently mentored by Simon Keenlyside. The mentoring, scholarships and fellowships of Independent Opera continue: catch this while you can.

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