Here's an idea for a new reality TV show: take a flighty wife, a jealous husband and an exotic stranger, lock them all in a room together and see if they make a comic opera. You could call it Big Buffa.

Actually, Rossini has had this idea already. Il Turco in Italia is an opera about the making of an opera, in which a blocked librettist, stumped for a subject, decides to observe his acquaintances to see if they conform to stereotype.

Director Giles Havergal's approach is a cheerful collision of eras and accessories - Jeremy Huw Williams's Poet strides on in Napoleonic dinner dress with a laptop tucked under his arm. "I must write a new libretto, but I cannot find a subject," he frets. Well, why doesn't he try Google?

The rest of the production is packed with playful anachronism. Russell Craig's design looks like Naples as envisaged in a Las Vegas theme hotel; the heroine sets about her husband with a handheld vacuum cleaner, and the first-act spat between the two principal women looks suspiciously like a catfight in the Big Brother house.

It's the kind of cheerful, throwaway approach to a second-tier work that gives festivals like Buxton a good name. Il Turco in Italia does not contain any of Rossini's most memorable arias, but it is end-to-end ensemble, in which the fine cast engage like cogs in an over-wound clockwork mechanism.

This isn't to suggest that there are not fine individual voices to savour: Michelle Walton brings a breezy, marshmallow-light mezzo to the role of Fiorilla; Margaret Preece matches her note for note with the higher-lying Zaida; Donald Maxwell positively underplays the bumbling Don Geronio.

Conductor Wyn Davies keeps things moving at a commendable lick, and Buxton's reputation for belly laughs emerges enhanced.

· In rep until July 24. Box office: 08451 272190