It’s an extraordinary thing that a director of Bruce Beresford’s reputation should be directing for Melbourne Opera until you remember that opera is one of the performing arts the famous film director lives for and that he has never been interested in position, only in what fires his imagination. The man who effectively discovered Morgan Freeman, who is entirely grateful to Tommy Lee Jones for making the ‘shithouse dialogue’ of Double Jeopardy ‘sound like Flaubert’ and who knocked unannounced on the door of the Irish novelist Brian Moore to persuade him to let him film Black Robe – his best...