This new issue enters a crowded field but on paper has some unusual characteristics to distinguish it. First is the venue, a vast outdoor space in Umeå, north Sweden; second is the production by La Fura dels Baus, which takes full advantage of that space. In many ways it’s a spectacular show. Copious amounts of blood-like liquid spill out into a kind of moat that surrounds a vast, primitive figure barely perceivable on the ground, its eyes lit, its face the site of most of the action. I say most, for some of it is transferred into enormous puppets into whose chests the principals plonk themselves. The first of these, which I initially took to be an apparition of Agamemnon himself, appears during Elektra’s cries to her father, but she has climbed into it herself by the end of the Monologue. Then Chrysothemis appears in hers. Then Klytemnestra arrives in hers, in this case something akin to a supersize Dalek, bedecked with gesticulating extras in full lycra bodysuits, who then descend with her to form a writhing human train.

But beyond the spectacle, which doesn’t always transfer to the small screen, the production doesn’t have a great deal to say, or, it seems, much interest in the piece itself. It’s a generalised response to a complex work which sees it simply as a gore-fest. The general aesthetic is a mess, too, with the familiar Fura dels Baus mixture of the primitive and the futuristic throwing up plenty of preposterous costumes. Elektra is burdened with a sort of umbilical cord throughout, which she severs with the axe at the close; Orestes resembles a futuristic building-site foreman; Aegisthus enters in a vintage motor car.

The musical performance is probably best characterised as heroic in the circumstances. The exception is Ingela Brimberg’s Elektra: the voice lacks a steely edge and – as far as one can tell – volume, but she gets through the role unscathed, turning in a touching Recognition Scene, during which she and Orestes are finally left to their own devices. The other principals are serviceable but overparted. Ramon Gamba conducts with a sure touch and the Norrlandsoperan’s Symphony Orchestra play securely from wherever they’re secreted – it’s not entirely clear.

One for the curious, then, but it certainly doesn’t dislodge Evelyn Herlitzius from Aix or Iréne Theorin in Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s fiercely pessimistic Salzburg production. This might have been one case, too, where for once a ‘making-of’ could really have added something.