Glee, spite and heart fuel Verdi’s Falstaff, a comic universe unto itself and his final work. Opera North’s new production, sung in English and conducted by Garry Walker, wrests every joule of warmth from this combustible masterpiece. It also launches the company’s “green season”, in which sustainability is the axiom. That cloud-scudding sky? Borrowed from last season’s Orpheus. The antlers? Shed by deer at nearby Harewood House. Only Falstaff’s caravan was a new purchase. Dating from the 1970s, complete with period-piece drinks cabinet and rusty patina, it too earns the status of preloved.
In Olivia Fuchs’s staging, designed by Leslie Travers, the home counties in which wealthy Alice Ford and Meg Page reside – Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is the libretto’s main source – is a dream of Dynasty-era aspiration. Big hair, big suits, shoulder pads, colour. A game of tennis matters more for the designer whites worn than for a quality lob or volley. In contrast, scurrilous Sir John Falstaff, the role deliciously inhabited by a fully padded Henry Waddington, is on his uppers, eking out an existence on the leftovers of entitlement and another bottle of sack.
