‘Tutto nel mondo e burla’ sings the company at the end of Verdi’s Falstaff — ‘All the world’s a joke’ — and how much you enjoy this opera probably depends upon how far you accept that truth. The 79-year-old Verdi coming out of retirement for one last laugh, finding in Arrigo Boito a librettist who could remake Shakespeare in the sun-kissed Italian of Boccaccio and Petrarch, and then composing a score that saves its deepest compassion for old fools and young lovers, its sweetness (according to Boito) ‘sprinkled across the comedy as one sprinkles sugar on a tart’: seriously, what right-thinking opera-lover, experiencing all of that, wouldn’t want to clink glasses with Sir John Falstaff?
Christopher Luscombe’s new staging doesn’t even bother to ask the question, and it’s easily the best thing I’ve seen at the Grange Festival. We’re in the Home Counties in 2019, but with better weather. The Garter Inn is the bar of a ropey heritage hotel, the Fords’ stockbroker-Georgian new-build boasts private moorings and Alice, Meg and the girls loll about on the decking or bitch around the breakfast bar.
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