Périchole is a pretty name - a pity that it means "half-breed bitch". The original Périchole was an 18th-century Peruvian street singer who caught the wandering eye of a lustful Spanish governor. The story of the viceroy and the vice-girl inspired several forgotten operas, a Thornton Wilder novel and a Jean Renoir film. But Jacques Offenbach's tipsy operetta is significant in that it marks the moment in his career when the champagne went flat. Offenbach, the satirist of Second Empire sleaze, began the piece before the Franco-Prussian war interrupted and switched the public mood from decadence to defeatism. Suddenly French society lost its appetite for burlesque, prompting him into a radical rethink.
To La Périchole's existing two acts he appended a third, set in a dismal dungeon where opponents of the viceroy were sent to rot. An opera that starts out in high spirits ends up in a thoroughly bad mood. The token happy ending does little to disguise the fact that for Offenbach, the giddy days of Orpheus in the Underworld were over and the sombreness of Takes of Hoffman was about to come.
Aidan Lang's excellent resuscitation of this uneven but enjoyable oddity is a production of two halves. The saucy, innuendo-laden first act winks and nudges its way through what sounds something like Carry On Carmen, then transmutes after the interval into a version of Fidelio played in the style of And When Did You Last See Your Husband?
To steer this kind of irreverence the right side of silliness, you need fresh, accomplished voices allied to instinctive comic timing. Luckily, Lang's production has both. Eric Roberts turns the viceroy into a weaselly spiv who warrants urgent investigation by Amnesty International. A natural comedian, Roberts would make a magnificent music-hall turn even if he did not come with a sonorous bass-baritone attached. And there are accomplished, sweetly sung performances from Victoria Simmonds as Périchole and Richard Coxon as her lover, Piquillo. This attractive young pair have a look of Gheorghiu and Alagna about them. It would be nice if they had all of their timbre as well, but to ask for anything more would be greedy.
· In rep until July 20. Box office: 01298 72190.
