Having big-time veteran Australian film director Bruce Beresford at the directorial helm piqued my interest in the opera Of Mice And Men. Another major attraction was the fact it’s composer, Carlisle Floyd, though elderly, is still very much alive, and how many operas can you say that about? What’s more, though there are numerous operas that allude to the American way of life but few, if any, have their roots in all-American soil.

The worrying aspect is that Floyd’s opera is based on John Steinbeck’s immortal, iconic novella. Can any composer and, more to the point, librettist (in this case, one and the same) hope to reach Steinbeck’s standard? What will be lost in translation? If nothing else, Floyd has captured Steinbeck’s intent, the true spirits of his key characters and the confounding moral complexities that pervade even the simplest of human existences.

Steinbeck’s triumph, for mine, is his ability to tell a good story in the very best conventional sense, while musing, potently, on existential dilemmas. A gift not lost on Floyd and one he’s brought to the stage of the Sydney Opera House, with a little bit of help from Bruce and company.

The setting is not a gilt drawing-room somewhere in middle Europe, but Salinas, California. It’s all barns and tumbleweed; card games and liquor. Men are men, and there are many of them, beavering away on Curley’s ranch. Only one busty, lusty lass is on-site, testing the involuntary celibacy of the bunkhouse males with her flirtatious ways. She’s Curley’s wife, untouchable and frustrated by his lack of attention and all-round impotence. Jacqueline Mabardi eats up this role, throwing her voice out there every bit as brazenly as her role demands. Brad Daley also wears the character of Curley very well.

Beresford has called upon, or had the exceptional fortune to be endowed with the design talents of John Stoddart, who has found substantial scale, in all dimensions, as if to mimic the expanse of the Wild West and America’s still prodigious wilderness and frontiers. There’s a large, nostalgic nod, also, to the flat, painted backdrops that were once to be found on so many Hollywood sound stages. The aesthetic is so effective, one can almost smell the dust kicked up by the horses.

It’s hard to know, given what we already know about BB, if I would’ve found his vision to be cinematic, otherwise. But it is, very much, to my mind; unapologetically so. The long and the short of it is it succeeds, admirably, on all levels: design; drama; musicality; meaning. On the strength of it, I’d welcome more direction from Beresford. To say nothing of more operas from living, not decomposing, composers.

The details: Of Mice And Men is at the Sydney Opera House tonight, Friday and August 11. Tickets through the Opera Australia website.