A silly, bouncy delight: Glyndebourne's In the Market for Love reviewed

Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera, it’s hard to imagine a less probable operatic outcome— even this year. I mean, Offenbach: the saucy skewerer of middle-class pretension; the dazzling, vulgar arriviste of 19th-century opera. It couldn’t have been more incongruous had the sideburned showman himself razzed up, bass thumping, in a pimped Renault 5 and started pulling skids on the ha-ha. He’s never been staged at Glyndebourne, and it’s not hard to guess why. The last time I saw an Offenbach one-acter done in the UK, it was Croquefer, a medieval farce that climaxes with the entire cast succumbing to projectile diarrhoea. Try turning that into a range of luxury gifts.

Well, one can dream. It wasn’t easy to generate an atmosphere of irreverent laughter amid the cobwebbed gardens (visiting Glyndebourne out of season is like glimpsing a supermodel on a bad-hair day) and a general awareness that, at any moment, even this tentative step towards normality might be crushed by a randomly descending lockdown. The socially-distanced, picnic-deprived audience was subdued, and it’s a tribute to the company that they managed to make everything buzz along quite as sparkily as it did.

This was way more helpful than the tide of earnest new-music commissions about the trauma of lockdown

So in Stephen Langridge’s production, Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle becomes In the Market for Love. There’s an 18-piece orchestra in the pit and a small chorus that bustles enthusiastically to and fro, adopting heroic attitudes with root vegetables. And although it’s 2020 and there’s a big bottle of hand sanitiser centre-stage, we’re still in Offenbach’s Parisian market hall, where three working-class matrons — Mesdames Bouillabaisse (Brenden Gunnell), Beurrefondu (Rupert Charlesworth) and Mangetout (Michael Wallace) — preside over their stalls, court the superannuated Major Raflafla (Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts) and try to work out which of them is actually the mother of the orphan Ciboulette (Nardus Williams).