Send in the clown

The tears of a clown have often fallen on fertile operatic ground. Think of Rigoletto and I Pagliacci; or The Yeomen of the Guard, where mock-Tudor merriment turns to ash in the mouth of the jester Jack Point. But what if the composer himself is the buffoon? Jacques Offenbach was the court jester of France’s Second Empire, and if he’s still (inaccurately) regarded as an essentially frivolous talent, well, let’s be blunt: his 100-plus stage works do include sentient vegetables, scenes of mass flatulence and at least one opera in which the title role is taken by a performing dog. Sympathy was in limited supply when, after the Franco-Prussian war, Offenbach suddenly came over all puppy-eyed and misunderstood in Fantasio (1872): a wistful, oddly unbalanced tale of a jester with the statutory broken heart.

There he is, though, moping behind the primary-coloured fun of this UK première production by Martin Duncan, and occasionally revealing himself through Jeremy Sams’s English translation. ‘Effectively I’ve disappeared’ muses Fantasio, a student who has adopted the motley of a conveniently dead court clown, the better to approach the prim but soft-hearted Princess Elsbeth — herself doomed to a dynastic marriage with the dim-bulb Prince of Mantua. ‘Does the role of a jester sometimes confuse you?’ he pleads, incredulous, as his fooling misfires and he’s thrown into gaol. I thought for a moment that Duncan was about to spin the show into a satire on our current era of synthetic outrage and offence archaeology. Offenbach would have gone there — at least the younger, more cocksure genius who wrote Orphée aux Enfers and La Vie parisienne.