Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss's best-known operetta, is regarded in some quarters as a piece that is wonderfully entertaining but meretricious at best. Like any great comedy, however, it has its dark side. As its title suggests, it deals with things hidden away by day that come out by night.
Between dusk and dawn, the would-be adulterer Eisenstein unsuccessfully attempts to pick up his disguised wife Rosalinde at a party, only to discover, by the cold light of day, that she in her turn has been carrying on with her former lover Alfred, an operatic tenor. "Who wouldn't choose happiness over truth?" Alfred comments acerbically as reality becomes apparent and everyone tries to evade it.
The problem with Stephen Lawless's new Glyndebourne production is that it, unfortunately, refuses to choose between happiness and truth. Lawless wants to examine the work's deeper resonances, but he also wants to give us a traditional romp, and we end up with neither. Aware that Freud later exposed the rot in the society Strauss depicts, Lawless transposes the operetta from the time of composition (1874) to around 1910.
Falke, the doctor who engineers the entire plot, looks like Freud himself; he tries to find a cure for Orlofsky's "pathological boredom" by setting up his orgiastic party in a gilded bell jar. Later, robbed of its glitter, it becomes the prison where Eisenstein and Rosalinde get their comeuppance by being literally shackled to each other.
All this sits uneasily with the musical and music-hall routines that suddenly take over, as ensembles become show numbers and the second-act ballet turns into a reworking of Morecambe and Wise's famous spoof of the cygnets' dance from Swan Lake. The surtitles, meanwhile, have become the main source of humour. The dialogue has been reworked in German so that the corresponding English title contains a double entendre, whether the German possesses one or not. Excellent individual performances, meanwhile, fail to compensate for the resulting uncertainty of tone and focus.
Thomas Allen is the seediest of Eisensteins, drooling over Pamela Armstrong's flamboyantly voluptuous Rosalinde and cruelly mocking Hakan Hagegard's quietly sinister Falke. Swedish mezzo Malena Ernman sounds scarily mannish as Orlofsky, and Par Lindskog is tremendous as Alfred - a great singer in reality, playing a third-rate one on stage. Vladimir Jurowski's conducting is compounded of sensuality, sentiment and acid. However, even he can't quite forge this curious effort into a satisfactory whole.
· In rep until August 30. Box office: 01273 81381.
