A thoroughly enjoyable grand old heap of nothing: The Excursions of Mr Broucek reviewed

Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one assumes) necking a couple of pints of unfiltered Pilsner, he’s splurged the entire design budget for Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek on the loudest tourist tat that the Mala Strana has to offer. Scale it up, pile it on stage; job’s a good ’un. There’s a snow globe and a Lenin candle; there are dinky toy houses and a cardboard pop-up of the Charles Bridge. A massive souvenir plate (badly cracked) hangs over the stage, blazoned with a panorama of Hradcany Hill and the single word – at least two feet high – PRAHA.

The Excursions of Mr Broucek, in case you hadn’t guessed, takes place in Prague, and Leslie Travers’s multicoloured toy shop of a set is one of the more surreal delights of this rare British staging. Pountney pumps it full of visual gags and equally lively action. This, after all, is an opera whose entire plot is the lager-fuelled fantasy of a Pooterish landlord on the way home from the pub. Mr Broucek spends most of the opera rat-arsed. He dreams that he’s travelled to the Moon, which turns out to be full of vegans, avant-garde creatives and post-feminist girl bands in spangly pants. The worst people on Earth, then, though Janacek’s iridescent, curiously wistful orchestral writing never really gets its satirical claws bloody.

Then he’s off into medieval Czech history, and unless you know your Hussites from your Holy Roman Emperors it probably won’t ring too many bells, though the raucous, sinfonietta-like pageantry of Janacek’s music (topped with full-throated choral singing) will more than compensate. Since Mr Broucek has begun the act inside a colossal beer stein – before being caught on the crapper, literally with his trousers down – you might not be inclined to overthink it anyway.