After its opening days of mafia melodrama and Gallic gaiety, the Buxton Festival has given its loyal audiences what amounts to a slap in the face: long Mozart and Handel rarities, grimly staged in war room and hospital.

Handel’s Orlando is the one set in a bare hospital ward. But at least Annilese Miskimmon, directing, takes more than one cue from Handel and his adaptation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. In the 16th, 18th and 21st centuries, unrequited love is, indeed, as destructive as war. And the sight of a soldier unmanned by his return to civilian life is painfully and wonderfully lamented in Handel’s musical depicton of Orlando’s madness.

At this point, Miskimmon’s production comes into its own. After an injection of morphine, red petals from the giant poppies that have formed the forest of Act II fall slowly down on Orlando. And the period-instrument orchestra of the Opera Theatre Company, Dublin, play, under Christian Curnyn, as exquisitely as they have done all evening.

Only a tendency to overdo the hysterical exits and entrances from those NHS swing doors threatens to bring the show dangerously near to Doctor in the House. Fighting this tendency on one hand, and contributing to it on the other, is the stolid bass of Henry Waddington as the consultant Zoroastro, two more uneasy and hooty counter-tenors in Andrew Radley’s Medoro and William Towers (pictured) in the title role. Sinead Campbell-Wallace struggles with the role of Angelica, but true Handelian style at last surfaces in the voice of Mhairi Lawson as the sadly wise nurse Dorinda.

Box office: 0845 1272190. Further performances July 23 & 27

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