It isn’t of course and you’re still a sea voyage and a whole other plotline

It isn’t, of course, and you’re still a sea voyage and a whole other plotline away from the Arizona desert where Manon and her devoted Des Grieux are bizarrely united in a dusty death. “There was only one thing I could do – follow her! And follow her I will – to the ends of the earth!” Those words, extracted from the original novel by Abbe Prevost, aroused considerable mirth from the first-night audience when they appeared on the supertitle display (just as they do in Puccini’s score) prior to the third act. So what was that? An audience caught off- guard into thinking they were witnessing a malfunction (they weren’t)? Or disbelief that, after the events of the previous act, any man would choose to follow this selfish woman anywhere. Leave alone Arizona, Sounds like the punchline to a bad Noel Coward joke. But if you, the audience, have somehow managed to fill out the narrative, to carry the emotional imperative of the piece over those daring inter- act jump-cuts, then Manon – the woman – becomes whole again. She’s very much a victim of her times, seeking to live by the truth of passion in a society where women are conditioned to be bought, where wealth is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and a woman without a dowry is predestined for the streets – or the convent That’s where she’s headed when we meet her. Tests have shown that when a Microban chopping board was infected with E coli 157 (the one associated with minced beef), the number of bacteria fell over 24 hours from 100,000 to 50.

So much of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut takes place between the acts that you half expect it to be over and done with upon your return from the dinner interval. It’s a cheerful opening but, on the evidence here, his work has little or nothing to do with where he lives.Nor, it seems, has the locality had much effect on Mona Hatoum, one of the visitors whose work is on show a few miles down the road at Newlyn. Current Disturbance, as she calls her cage of electrical wire and flickering bulbs, was commissioned especially for A Quality of Light, but it looks exactly as it would if she’d made it for London, New York or Berlin. There will be something here to touch the imaginations of most of west Cornwall’s summer visitors.

It’s an ambitious project, too disparate and too far from the track of its intended theme to be entirely convincing, but worth the journey west none the less. They are hypnotic pictures, seemingly alive and yet pointedly still, which require and repay slow absorption. I have never seen his work looking so good, but just how such quiet qualities will stand up to the bustle of the gallery in high summer remains to be seen.I have mentioned seven artists – there are seven others in the official line up (including a fine room of Bridget Riley at the Tate), not to mention all the local painters and sculptors who are opening their studios on the back of the event. It is an effective and rather beautiful combination, meditative and almost monastic, which clarifies the subtle rhythms that are at work behind Hugonin’s rows of minute coloured marks. Of the three, Hugonin’s delicate abstracts make the best transition into the gallery, where four of his paintings share a room with Barbara Hepworth’s Pelagos.