Ah, so that’s where the kangaroo comes in! Garsington Opera produces a souvenir mug each summer decorated with cartoons of that year’s operas. Buy yours early enough, and you get a ceramic preview of the season – in the case of Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a drawing of a kangaroo. True, Barry’s operas are famously anarchic. But quite where a marsupial was supposed to fit into Oscar Wilde’s comedy was unclear until halfway through Act One. Suddenly, there it was: fuzzy and large as life, lolloping dolefully across the stage.

Because? Well, because someone said ‘Australia’, silly. That’s how it works. When Lady Bracknell (a mad-eyed Henry Waddington) mentions the French Revolution, Jack (Zahid Siddiqui) duly positions his head in a miniature guillotine while the butler (Peter Lidbetter) pelts him with cabbages from an on-stage kitchen. All the while, Barry’s brutalist music motors straight ahead. Sometimes the brass get wheel-slip, and whirr and skid on the spot. Lidbetter destroys a restaurant’s worth of crockery in strict tempo, and Barry never saw a piano without wanting to smash every key together at the same time.

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