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.