Opera has often been about appetite – but never quite like this. Tarrare – it is a true story, or founded in truth – was an unlucky French boy in revolutionary Paris whose constant enormous hunger led him to wolf down anything he could lay his hands on – rocks, cats, trash, half a cow, you name it.

He started out as a grotesque street entertainer, then was recruited into the army (a stupid plan to use him as a spy carrying messages in his tummy) and he inevitably ended up in hospital, suffering various experimental and unsuccessful cures. He died in his twenties.

I am not sure if this sad (and by all accounts quite vile) figure is the ideal subject for anything but a gross-out film, but this piece of music-theatre does a kind-hearted job of rescuing the story from horror and saving it for pity. This necessitates a certain romanticising: it is after all rather hard, and not much fun, to think how genuinely awful the reality must have been.