As the rainbow-striped butcher’s curtain rises on Opera North’s new Falstaff, our hero resembles nothing so much as Santa Claus on a cut-price camping holiday. Down on his luck in a ramshackle caravan, Henry Waddington’s white-maned and round-bellied Sir John is assessing the damage, physical and financial, of his latest night of excess. Grubby and grasping, he could so easily be grotesque as well, but as the man himself says in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “There is virtue in that Falstaff.” And so it proves here. The twinkle in this Falstaff’s eye, his endearing immunity to embarrassment, and above all an unfailing sense of humour suffuse the whole of Olivia Fuchs’s production, the first of three shows in the company’s sustainably staged “Green Season”.
This is not Shakespeare’s Windsor, but the Windsor of the upwardly mobile 1980s, where Alice Ford, whose seduction is at the centre of Falstaff’s latest money-making scheme, conspires against him with her pals at the tennis club, and her daughter Nannetta pines for a long-haired Fenton in a Joy Division T-shirt. The transposition arguably makes more sense in the suburban settings of the first half, where comic intrigues happily play out as soap opera tinged farce, than for Falstaff’s climactic humiliation in the woods of Windsor Park. But the appearance of an oak tree assembled entirely from antlers (real ones, discarded by the deer of Harewood House) has real magic about it: one of several masterstrokes from Leslie Travers, whose designs will interconnect across all three “green” productions.
Waddington relishes every moment of the title role, singing with almost Lieder-like attention to text in Falstaff’s wordier passages but plenty of grand opera heft in his pomp, and a healthy helping of lyricism to balance out the bluster. Kate Royal’s Alice is every bit his comic match; the voice lacks a touch of lustre at times, but she’s on sparky form for the chaos of the final scenes. Richard Burkhard brings a dash of Verdian panache to Ford’s mock-serious jealousy aria, while Isabelle Peters (Nannetta) and Egor Zhuravskii (Fenton) charm as a pair of brightly sung lovers. There’s strong singing and dead-on comic timing from all their various cronies and hangers-on; Louise Winter’s warm, wise Quickly and Paul Nilon’s incisive tone as the hypocritical Dr Caius are especially memorable.
The fun continues past the footlights. Garry Walker leads the Orchestra of Opera North on a merry dance through the extraordinarily rich, surprising score of Verdi’s final opera, keeping its complex ensembles in check (one or two momentary wobbles aside) and milking moments of comic word painting and self-parody for all their worth. Its carbon footprint might be small, but this Falstaff has a huge smile on its face.
• At the Grand theatre, Leeds, until 25 October. Then touring
