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Forget 'signed' performances of opera, with a lone interpreter standing at the side of the stage: this wasn’t just next level, it was a whole different universe.

The LA Philharmonic premiered this collaboration with Deaf West Theatre a couple of years ago at home, and now it’s been on tour in Europe, ending in London. Taking the idea of 'inclusion' from the side to the centre of the stage, it is a dramatic re-imagining of Beethoven’s opera that is for in large part wholly convincing.

David Portillo and Andrew Staples in Fidelio | Photo Credit: Ash Knotek/Barbican

First of all, it’s a straight performance of Beethoven: Gustavo Dudamel and his orchestra powering through the music in a way that is not always terribly subtle, but certainly solid, and a strong cast of singers. But then the differences kick in: each singer (oddly draped in priestly white robes) was accompanied by an actor double, enacting the drama through a whole-body sign language. An amazing sight, actually, rather far from the mime you might expect, and equally far from regular signing, it comes across as a mix of ritual acting (such as you might find in Japan) and 19th-century melodrama, with a lot of arm movement and strikingly vivid, even violent, mimed actions. It’s the actors who interact, not the singers, who stand hieratically apart (and sometimes commune rather touchingly with their 'shadows') – and their control and beauty of movement forms the essence of what became rather a hypnotic drama.

It didn’t always work – sometimes the stage was just too full of gesticulating figures (the chorus was likewise shadowed by actors) – but when it did, as in the early quartet ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’, there was a distinct frisson. And sometimes you felt the singers didn’t quite know what to do with themselves – stuck somewhere between a concert performance and the limited gestures of a semi-staging. Doing the dialogue entirely in sign-language – with no speech – was also not calculated to keep the continuity going.

Gabriella Reyes and Sophia Morales in Fidelio | Photo Credit: Ash Knotek/Barbican

And Beethoven’s music, of course, worked as usual – notably the almost hysterically ecstatic ending. There were humdrum moments when orchestral inspiration dropped, and I expect the orchestra was pretty exhausted after the tour, but they were driven along by Dudamel, and my favourite musician of the evening was the brilliant timpanist Joseph Pereira. Among the singers, Gabriella Reyes’s Marzellina made a strong impression with her radiant voice, and Giovanni Maucere’s fantastically villainous (acted) Pizarro was something to see.

A one-off, for sure, but it went down a storm with the kind of audience you rarely see at an opera.