The finest Falstaff you’ll see this summer

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.

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.