Geoff Brown [Times Online, 8 February 2010]

So, once more we plunge into that melodramatic cauldron, that brooding nonsense, that is Lucia di Lammermoor. On its first outing in 2008 David Alden’s grimly stylised, psychopathological take on the opera that Donizetti squeezed from a capacious Sir Walter Scott novel gathered assorted praise. This time round, the director’s shock treatment of life in Lucia’s Scottish manse — think Grand Guignol reimagined by Ibsen — shocks and impresses rather less.