Così fan Tutte review – self-conscious staginess is surreal fun in beautifully sung revival

Royal Opera House, London
The men prance about in fake moustaches while the women roll their eyes in this turbo-charged revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s riotous take on Mozart’s opera

‘Is that the one with the mobile phones?” someone asked me ahead of the latest revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s 2016 production of Così fan Tutte. That’s the one, but those phones are just one cameo in a staging that rampages around time and place with riotous energy and accessories galore. Although Da Ponte’s libretto about male naivety and female faithlessness theoretically unfolds in a single 24-hour period, the Aristotelian unities don’t trouble us here.

Act One alone hurtles from a 21st-century night at the Royal Opera (still clutching their red programme books, the opera’s two couples have just watched … Mozart’s Così fan Tutte) to a farewell scene at a Brief Encounter-ish station, to a bar populated by a kind of Rat Pack of aggressively flirtatious men wearing thin black ties and porkpie hats, to a Technicolor Eden where the now-disguised Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to poison themselves under an apple tree sporting a prominent serpent.