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The walls of his home are covered in paintings, including a 17th-century depiction of Adonis and his mother Myrrha by an anonymous Venetian artist.

Stangenberg, an striking and eccentric comédienne, returns later in the evening as Myrrha, an enslaved Greek woman who is Sardanapalus’s lover.

Beset with an undeniable lust for her father, Myrrha eventually becomes the mother of the beautiful and equally doomed Adonis.

El-Khoury, a Lebanese-Canadian who specialises in bel canto – a rich and lyrical type of operatic singing – says she did not hesitate to take on the main female role of Myrrha.

By recasting in verse such mythological and historical stories as those of Myrrha and King Cinyras, or retracing the fallen friendship between Jamuqa and Genghis Khan, or transforming Raphael’s great painting “School of Athens” into a nightmare of competing ideologies, Bidart exhibits how cyclical and fated are all of our destinies.