The director of this production, Ellen Kent, is something of a veteran after four decades of operatic concoctions, but it was an infant prodigy who made her most proud in her latest touring melodrama.

Georgiy Forminichenko, who played Butterfly’s son, is a three-year-old who performs as naturally as someone ten times his age, threatening to steal the show through sheer novelty value at times on a stage awash with elaborate kimonos and kaleidoscopic exoticism.

It can feel hard to engage with the 113-year-old story Madama Butterfly is based upon, which always seems to possess an implicit undercurrent of uncomfortable colonialism towards the Orient, enveloping the drawn-out tragedy of a fragile maiden (our heroine is repeatedly compared to a butterfly) which is hardly an enchanting ode to equality.

The Geisha’s fawning for the unconvincing advances of the visiting Lieutenant Pinkerton – played slightly underwhelmingly here by Andriy Perfilov – make her heartbreak and suicide at his ultimate polygamy inevitable, captured in an impressive display of poise and despair from Rosa Lee Thomas in the lead role.

The Ukrainian National Opera Of Kharkiv score was all twangling, dreamy harps, mellifluous bass and soaring strings, and it proved irresistibly beautiful enough to surpass both storyline shortfalls and subtitles which sporadically misfired and managed to misspell three-letter words.

Thomas looked noticeably older than the 15-year-old she was supposed to embody, but her fierce vocal range and excellent acting prevailed and, occasional flaws aside, made this an affecting and entertaining spectacle.