Alexandra Coghlan

The finest Falstaff you’ll see this summer

Plus: a Bohème that sacrifices light-footed laughs for large-scale spectacle

Roland Wood, far right, as a magisterial Falstaff in David McVicar's new production for the Scottish Opera. Image: James Glossop

Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency — a constellation of shifting risk factors, many beyond control, any of which can kill a joke deader than Dogecoin.

Opera is already at a disadvantage. Timing — comedy’s accelerant of choice — is predetermined, dictated by the demands of unwieldy choruses and slow-moving sets, pinned down to the second by a score whose creator may be anything but a natural comedian. Just ask Verdi, whose early farce Un Giorno di Regno was such a comprehensive flop that he gave up the genre altogether for almost an entire career.

But at 75, all but retired after a sequence of bloody tragedies, the composer returned for one last shot at comic victory. The result is Falstaff, a comedy still arguably unsurpassed in the repertoire. Recent trends have seen it played as sitcom, a giddy reel of sight-gags and slapstick, but that’s not what we get from David McVicar and his grown-up new staging for Scottish Opera.

Best to say it straight: McVicar’s Falstaff isn’t funny — not in the laugh-out-loud sense, anyway. What we get here is warmth, slow-spreading operatic sunshine that seeps into your bones, accompanied by a cool tickle of dramatic breeze just bracing enough to keep things from slipping into languor.

Roland Wood’s magisterial Falstaff is the finest you’ll see this summer

We’re in the 17th century. Vermeer’s milkmaid bustles around a Star and Garter that has seen better days. We discover the crapulent knight beached on a bed of grimy linen, crawling with maidservants and (one assumes) lice — a grotesque Hogarth levée. This is the world of Pepys’s diaries, bloated with food and drink, all loose sexual exploits and even looser bowels.

The costumes are a riot of jewel-coloured silks; Ford’s money bag tumbles heavy on to the table and his lace collars are starched and embroidered perfection.

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