Sparky and often hilarious: Garsington’s Un giorno di regno reviewed

Hang out with both trainspotters and opera buffs and you’ll soon notice that opera buffs are by far the more trainspotterish. It’s the pedantry, the one-upmanship (‘Really? You should have heard it with Goodall in 1976’). Above all, it’s the impulse to collect. You can’t actually buy little pocket books with lists of obscure operas to be underlined in biro once you’ve seen them (blue for a full staging, red for a concert performance) but there are certainly opera-goers who compile their own lists of personal stats – and they let you know it. The completist urge is powerful. Hardcore opera-spotters will cheerfully cross continents to cop a rare performance of Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber or César Franck’s Hulda.

Anyway: good news, opera nerds, because this year’s summer season offers two highly collectable bits of rep. First up is Garsington, where the surprise hit of the season is Verdi’s early flop Un giorno di regno, in a sparky and often hilarious new staging by Christopher Alden. This was Verdi’s second opera and it ran for precisely one night in 1840 before being pulled. Only the fact that he was under contract persuaded Verdi not to quit opera altogether; which is fortunate because his next effort was Nabucco. But Un giorno di regno was consigned to the dustbin of history and for opera buffs that’s great because it allows them to demonstrate their superior discernment: ‘What, you don’t know it? It’s actually rather good.’

In truth it’s merely adequate, in a Donizetti-plus-Red-Bull sort of way, but Alden and his cast sell it like it’s a masterpiece. The 18th-century setting is updated to the present day and the blingy marble-clad foyer of Baron Kelbar’s armaments firm, complete with gun-toting security goons and a video wall which Alden uses to clarify the twists and turns of the plot via the medium of rolling news.