The Drottningholm opera festival is held in a theatre that was untouched for a century. Michael Dervan reports from Stockholm

Time travel is not yet a feature of the tourist industry. But there are various experiences, some entirely natural, others man-made, which offer a sense of pleasurably vertiginous transport, as if to draw one into the air and ambience of time long past. Such an experience was had by a young historian of theatre, Agne Beijer, in 1921, when he fell upon the Drottningholm Court Theatre near Stockholm, which had lain untouched for over a century since the assassination there of Sweden's King Gustaf III.

The theatre, quite simply, had been preserved by neglect. Sets of original stage scenery had survived, some 15 complete, and even more in an incomplete state. The original stage machinery, allowing for elaborate but very quick scene changes, was intact. There was equipment for creating the effect of waves, cloud cars to deliver characters from heaven to earth, lighting machinery, even wind and thunder machines. And the decision seems to have been made that other people should share in this most unusual of time-warps. The intimate, 454-seat theatre, was soon open for public performance.

The theatre is still in use, mainly for the performance of opera during the summer months, and the Swedish authorities have managed the rare feat of keeping the atmosphere as that of a theatre, albeit a most unusual one - the front of house staff are dressed in 18th-century style, the men complete with wigs - rather than that of a museum. But nothing much has been done to hide the age of the building, or mask the wear and tear of the centuries.

The wear, in fact, though now carefully monitored and controlled, is part of the Drottningholm experience. The venue is not only old in general, but also - blatantly - in detail, in ways that no one can miss, from wallpaper to wood to details of paint and decoration.

The auditorium is even more intimate than that of the Wexford Festival, though the stage is, by comparison, huge. With a depth of 20 metres, it's still, in the 21st century, one of the deepest in Sweden - the depth is used to achieve those steep perspectives which were such a feature of opera stagings in the 18th century. The acoustic is clear and open, the sort of acoustic which doesn't impinge on the ear. To paraphrase Stravinsky (who was talking about orchestration), a good acoustic is one you just don't notice.

The 2002 operas at Drottningholm were Edouard du Puy's 1814 Swedish Singspiel, Ungdom och Dårskap (Youth and Folly), Mozart's Magic Flute in Swedish, and Handel's Tamerlano, in a production by Pierre Audi, with Christophe Rousset conducting the period instruments of the Drottningholm Theatre Orchestra, which included pairs of oboes, flutes, recorders and clarinets.

Tamerlano contains some of Handel's finest dramatic music, which the composer provided not for the Tartar emperor of the title, but for Bajazet, the Ottoman sultan he holds captive. Tamerlano, the confidently imperious counter tenor Bejun Mehta, although already betrothed, falls in love with Bajazet's daughter Asteria, the sure and true soprano, Sandrine Piau. Asteria, seeing a chance to poison her oppressor, plays along, much to the consternation of those closest to her. The Greek prince Andronico, the conflicted contralto Anna Larsson, finds himself drawn into Tamerlano's intrigue, although he is himself in love with Asteria. And Tamerlano survives Asteria's poison only through the intervention of the rejected Irene, princess of Trebizond, whose complex nobility is well caught by mezzo soprano Kristina Hammarström.

The star of the show, however, is tenor Nigel Robson's Bajazet, whose black despair and fatherly fury lead ultimately to suicide, and a scene of emotional maelstrom that Robson threw himself into with an appearance of reckless abandon, dramatic in the extreme, yet musically focused, even at its most audacious.

Audi's direction subtly underpinned the relationships in a politico-amorous hothouse, with Patrick Kinmonth choosing to echo the 18th century in his costumes, and Matthew Richardson's lighting providing some striking floods that somehow seemed to keep in within the spirit of this unique venue, with its candle-dim auditorium and its air of long-lost time and place.