There was a fad a while back for photo books about Eastern bloc architecture. Derelict megastructures, brutalist monuments; you couldn’t move for them in the Barbican gift shop. Anyhow, Patrick Nolan and Leslie Travers – the director and designer respectively of Opera North’s new production of Eugene Onegin – were presumably big fans, because they’ve relocated the action to a provincial sports centre in the dying years of the USSR. It’s a fairly common gambit with Slavic operas. British opera companies are surely world leaders, by now, at rendering faded paintwork and water-stained concrete.

But why? It’s still Russia, of course, and presumably the idea is to make modern audiences feel closer to the action, though Tchaikovsky’s original Pushkin-era setting is surely far more comprehensible to Austen-loving British audiences than whatever was going on in Magnitogorsk circa 1983. Still, it does sort of work (we’ll come back to that ‘sort of’) and the visuals are very well-observed: grimy tea urns, faded propaganda posters and great chunks of collapsing ceiling.

Add period-appropriate costumes (by Elizabeth Gadsby) and the end result looks authentically repulsive, reaching a nadir in Act Two’s ball scene: a face-melting hellscape of 1980s leisurewear, pullulating with shoulder pads and........

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