The Fairy Queen (1692), Henry Purcell’s third "dramatick opera", has been for some time ripe material for revision, particularly since its rediscovery by the twentieth century early-music movement. It has loose origins in the mystical world of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though, as musicologist Curtis Price signposted, it is best seen as "an extended meditation on the spell [Dream] casts".

Its quintessentially English possibilities might explain why, for instance, an arrangement by Lambert and Dent was chosen to mark the first post-war production at Covent Garden in 1946. Further testimony to the work’s malleability, a more recent 2011 reconception, by Picket and Lozano, substituted the original cast, by librettist Thomas Betterton, of Juno, Phoebus, Summer and Sleep for present-day exemplars: the Career Girl, the Biker, the Bank Clerk, and so on. In the latter production, the dynamics of the newly assembled cast provided a narrative impetus to this arguably inchoate, and unarguably sprawling, piece of Restoration semi-opera. I therefore began by asking Sophie Rashbrook, the director of a new reworking of the Fairy Queen to be staged in West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge on 2 November, as to the general conception behind her approach. "Just as Purcell was inspired by Shakespeare, so I was inspired to make Purcell’s legacy anew … it was the fragmented nature of the opera that appealed to me. Our intention is an accessible revelling in the incompleteness of the Purcell".

Curiously Rashbrook has drawn on the work’s inchoateness to "find a solution" to its apparent absence of plot, though, I hastened to add, the problem of its legibility is surely more acute in our literal age? "Our narrative is tied together by the creative frustrations of a young William Shakespeare, who is suffering from writer’s block. Discarded parchments come to life, to tease him, to send him to sleep, and hereafter we enter a dream world" that comes alive on stage through words, cinema, and music. The dream world of Shakespeare (played by the ineffably handsome Jonathan Hyde), plays host to such stock-and-trade characters as Puck (Sophie Horrocks) and Queen Bess (Janneke Dupre).

I suggested to Rashbrook that the anarchic bawdiness of, say, the Drunken Poet scene (Purcell’s own revision of 1693) was a welcome and public antidote to the dreary period of the Protestant Interregnum, yet Act V in the original scoring is, to my mind, a high-flown celebration of the co-regency’s fifteenth wedding anniversary (read: Purcell’s pitch for royal patronage after Charles II). Did she have any reservations about competing aspects of the work – and ultimately its function – in her twenty-first-century adaption? "Certainly we wanted to make the production accessible – there is a potential schools’ tour in the offing, for example – but I do think our approach mirrors what is happening in musical and dramatic cultural more generally: interesting things are arising out of collision between genre and form". Here we might recall Nonclassical – classical-music club nights based in Hoxton, London - or Thomas Ades’s Asyla (1997), which is saturated with dance rhythms from throbbing raves. Sophie comments that though the musical extracts remain faithful to Purcell’s scoring, poems by T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes sit alongside extracts Richard III and The Tempest; and cinematic sequences (by Rob Hawkins) will be projected onto vast screens, exploiting new technology to overcome what was, in Restoration England, the dilemma of "changeable scenery", first imported from sixteenth-century Italy.

Though Rashbrook was the driving-force behind this initiative, enlisting the support of Cambridge University Opera Society, the ‘Festival of Ideas’, and the Faculty of Music’s outreach department, she is keen to stress the collaborative approach the company has taken, "open to revision". Sophie has previously worked with the production’s conductor (Patrick Milne) in a much-applauded account of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1762). This further collaboration sets to offer another, endlessly fascinating account, recasting seventeenth-century ambivalences between high seriousness and low carousing in a timeless setting. It might only be a one-night-stand, but Secresie, in Betterton’s original libretto, forewarns that "one charming night gives more delight than a thousand lucky days". This is not one to be missed.