Plank by plank, the turning of a Gloucestershire barn into a 500-seat opera house grows more engrossing by the year. This summer the Graham family, Longborough's plucky owners, have added three giant statues of Wagner, Mozart and Verdi to the roof, and - more prosaically, but also more usefully - greatly improved the ladies' loos (though I have to take that on trust). Perhaps they should stick Janácek on the roof as well, because Richard Studer's new staging of Vixen is perfectly attuned to Longborough's village-show-meets-grand-opera ethos. It uses well-rehearsed local children to play the smaller animals, and conjures stage magic from limited resources. Studer's set consists merely of little hillocks, over which the animals constantly roll what seem to be stylised mill-wheels. It's as if they are going about some secret work on the forest floor.

But the main roles are taken by young professional singers who convey admirably the underlying themes of this anthropomorphic masterpiece. Vixen is far more than a furry pantomime, of course. The human characters are disillusioned by their dreary lives, stricken by loneliness and paralysed by fear of mortality. That is touchingly conveyed by Andrew Rees's crumpled Schoolmaster, Wyn Pencarreg's bleak Parson and Mark Saberton's braggart Poacher.

By contrast, the Forester (Paul Keohone, stern-faced and strong-voiced) wins a kind of transcendental peace at the end by observing, and finally understanding, the self-renewing cycle of animal life. What I like about this production, and particularly about the incisively sung Vixen of Ella Kirkpatrick, is the notably unsentimental way in which this inexorable and eternal cycle is presented. Perhaps that comes from staging Vixen in the countryside. Either way, I think Janácek would have relished the aptness of seeing his great animal opera presented in a venue where cows once supped.

Jonathan Lyness's gently-paced reading brings out the Straussian warmth and lyricism in the score. But his fiddles struggle with the high, jagged, stuttering lines, and this uncertainty sometimes diminishes the evening's impact, even if it also reminds us how quirky and unexpected Janácek's inspiration could be.

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