Fledermaus, Irish National Opera review - sex, please, we're Viennese/American/Russian/Irish

Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10 instrumentalists on stage. As for the rest, not even the likes of Richard Jones, Harry Kupfer and Christopher Alden have won a total victory. Davey Kelleher comes closer, but the high jinks can still be wearing in the outer acts.

For its touring farce, Irish National Opera has dropped the "Die" from the title of Johann Strauss II's smash hit, allowing the German bat to be mentioned throughout without the definite article in an English-language context (translation by Daniel Dooner and Stephen Lawless, witty at times but hardly WS Gilbert). It's all revenge-bent Dr Falke's conceit, including the blingy party and its host, a cockney club-owner pal who puts on a Russian accent, splendidly in mezzo Sharon Carty's star turn. The company is cast from strength, as always – it says much for the ensemble spirit that yesterday afternoon Megan O'Neill stepped into the role of maid Adele and shone as brightly as anyone – and everyone acts their socks off too.  Kelleher's solution to the Act One bedroom farce is to go for everyone saucing and sexing it up; Jade Phoenix's Rosalinde, Hollywood star of the past somehow congruous with the contemporary look of the rest, Aaron O'Hare's lover Alfred, tenor with the long D (the two pictured above), Alex McKissick's glossy husband Eisenstein and Ben McAteer's gay friend Falke do the buttock-pressing, the pratfalls, the posturing clinches, the woe-is-me-not brow-stroking, to perfection. The laughs still don't come thick and fast here. We have to wait until after the interval for the entertainment of "Prince Orlofsky", and then it all flows. 

No set-piece falls flat; the stakes are raised in the delicious duet where Phoenix as Rosalinde as "Hungarian Countess" steals the seducer-watch of Eisenstein/"Marquis Renard" and delivers the big aria – as "Klänge der Heimat", further adding to the surely-she's-not-singing-in-Hungarian bewilderment – with all the panache it needs. Jennifer Davis's concert performance in Dublin's National Concert Hall on New Year's Day was quite an act to follow, but the younger Irish soprano rises to the challenge.The "Duidu" ensemble is played for comedy rather than sentimentality, McAteer's voluminous, charismatic Falke snapping his boyfriend's braces at the start, cocaine passed around to add to the wooziness (the company pictured above). There's delicious choreography by Stephanie Dufresne to the Thunder and Lightning Polka, and everything rolls on riotously to 6am. Can they carry off the drawn-out prison denouement too? Sadly not until a late stage, though Seán Boylan's governor Frank now proves McKissick's equal in tumbling foolishness and the trio in which Eisenstein apes lawyer Dr Blind to catch his wife and her lover out (pictured below) is very classy indeed.

So are the arrangements throughout of Richard Peirson – conductor, pianist and game participant, clearly a major talent, with superb players at his disposal. Paul O'Mahony's clever design makes the most of economy by having them wrapped in curtains chez Eisenstein, and behind bars in Act 3.  At least the production errs on the side of exhausting rather than insipid, but it's no more staged Fledermauses for me, even if I won't desert the ageless Boskovsky recording with the likes of Rothenberger, Fassbaender, Gedda and Fischer-Dieskau (plus the late Otto Schenk actually funny as Frosch, a part which could have been shorn here). Full marks to INO, all the same, for making a success of its latest 10-venue tour.

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