As the Overture plays, the main characters enter via a walkway that extends across the auditorium behind the conductor. They are struggling with luggage – trunks, suitcases, hatboxes. On the stage the staff are grouped, placards of welcome in their hands. The Almavivas have arrived for a holiday at their summer residence by the sea, servants in tow. Susanna loses no time in applying her suncream. But it’s a short holiday, because after the ‘day of madness’ the Almaviva party is off home, luggage and all.

Judging from the luggage, the setting is some time between the world wars. It’s hard to tell more precisely from the clothes. Figaro, with slicked-back hair, wears a waistcoat and bow tie. The Countess is in baggy trousers, while the Count is variously in cricket whites, a striped blazer, and singlet and shorts; he puzzlingly calls on Susanna still wearing the helmet and goggles donned for the journey. Cherubino is in 18th-century costume: appropriate livery for a servant, perhaps, but not for a page from an aristocratic family.

This is all well and good, and the brouhaha is entertaining in its way, but the essential distinction between the classes is pretty well ignored. In particular the Count – bested by the servants, of course, but still a formidable figure – is made to look ridiculous. He collapses among the suitcases and baskets on entering; he jives in the Act 2 finale; at the end of ‘Vedrò mentr’io sospiro’ he cuts his hand as he crushes a wine-glass and makes a comic face of agony before running off.

Where the production goes over the top, though, is with the continual presence of characters who shouldn’t be there. Sometimes they observe; sometimes they participate. During Bartolo’s ‘La vendetta’, Susanna, the bride-to-be, witnesses Marcellina trying on her bridal veil. Barbarina sees Cherubino being dressed as a girl, and both she and Susanna watch the dangerously intimate scene with the Countess. When Figaro, supposedly alone, rails against women, Susanna is there, kissing and stroking him – to which he is oblivious. There is, in general, an awful lot of coming and going.

The film direction by Hannes Rossacher is good, a particularly moving instance being when the camera focuses on each happy couple in turn (including Cherubino and Barbarina) during the ensemble that follows the Countess’s ‘Più dolce io sono’. The recognition sextet comes after ‘Dove sono’: an improvement dramatically but, unfortunately, inauthentic. Marcellina’s Act 4 aria is included but Don Basilio’s is omitted. There are no weak links in the cast, and Gustavo Dudamel keeps things moving along nicely. This production by Jürgen Flimm and Gudrun Hartmann is not one that I care for much; but what it does, however misguided, it does well.