Michael Nyman’s one–act chamber opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat takes as its subject Dr P, a man suffering from visual agnosia, or ‘mental blindness’, and is adapted from the neurological study in the book of the same name by Oliver Sacks. For Nyman, Dr P ‘requires music as a lifeline, cue, clue, cure’, living as he does in a world lacking visual meaning. It is through his musical gifts that Dr P reclaims meaning from chaos, Nyman’s tautly conceived masterpiece providing a perfect medium through which the moving drama can be explored.