Audiences at English National Opera are being encouraged to file an online review of the performance they attend. A notice above the proscenium advertises the website ( www.eno.org/eno_interactive ). Judging by the company's latest production of Turandot , there must be a similar sign above the stage door: this one reads "write your own script". Dramatic licence has a fine tradition at ENO but, in Turandot , West End darling Rupert Goold ( Enron , Oliver! ) has followed the instruction to the letter. Just as Puccini took Gozzi's drama as the starting point for a romantic fantasy about China, Goold takes Puccini's opera as the starting point for a theatre director's fantasy about . . .

Opera? Sadism? Chinese restaurants? Maybe ENO's interactive website will provide the answer, because Goold's Turandot throws up even more riddles than Puccini's ice princess. Unlike the opera, which involves various beheadings and a suicide, the only life to be sacrificed in Goold's scenario (apart from his own as an opera director) is that of a mute Writer who inhabits the stage from start to finish, scripting every twist of the drama until he gets slashed by Turandot and expires in his own blood. Presumably Goold wants to allude to Puccini's creative crisis after Liù's suicide, a crisis he could only resolve by his own death - leaving the opera unfinished. Goold can't quite get round that one - the Alfano completion is used - but he peppers the action with a child-fairy who picks up the script from the expiring scribe and runs, giving his creation a life beyond his control.