The Bartered Bride review, Garsington: Ambridge meets Ealing in this jolly update

After nine years in its second home on the Chiltern Hills estate of American philanthropist Mark Getty, Garsington Opera thrives: artistic standards have risen as the output of performances has almost doubled over the decade, and there are plans to build a resources centre on site. The “visitor experience” is excellent; the future looks bright.

Meanwhile the 2019 season kicks off with a jolly and colourful production of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. Classified as a comic opera, it raises gentle smiles rather than belly laughs, though its tale of strong-minded Marenka, tricked into thinking she must be sold for cash and married to the stuttering simpleton Vasek, may be distasteful to modern sensibilities, despite the happy ending.

Paul Curran’s staging updates the original Bohemian village location to small-town post-war England – somewhere between Ealing Comedy and The Archers.

This allows some sharp characterisation and amusing detail (a trendy vicar, WI cakes, and a keep-fit class), as well as licensing designer Kevin Knight to provide three splendidly accurate period sets, notably a pub interior. It’s a very good-looking spectacle, crowned by a show-stopping visit from a travelling circus.

The only problem – unfortunately fundamental – is that the plot revolves round Kecal, a venal marriage broker hired by parents to negotiate suitable matches for their offspring. Yet however benighted Ambridge was in the Fifties, girls and boys there could marry freely, and Joshua Bloom’s amiable but unfocused presentation of Kecal as a spivvy solicitor doesn’t carry any convincing weight. Without this essential element of plausibility, one’s interest in the intrigue sags – such a situation could never have arisen.