How far do you truly believe? Perhaps it’s a waste of time even to ask the question

Readers familiar with Idomeneo might have shared my pleasure (and bemusement) at a performance of Mozart’s early opera at the Coliseum in London last week. The English National Opera production, which staged most of the action in what appeared to be a top-quality modern hotel, was ludicrous (I found the waiters distracting, but then I often do), but no more ludicrous than any other imaginable 21st-century staging of an 18th-century account of an ancient Greek tale.

No, what perplexed me was the part played in the narrative by the gods. At one point near the end we literally and explicitly encounter a deus ex machina when the voice of Zeus, offstage, cuts a Gordian knot and briskly resolves the plot; but the implicit intervention (or feared intervention) of the gods, especially the vengeful Poseidon, is what carries the storyline throughout.

I will not detain you with the plot, which I lost in the first five minutes, then fitfully regained.