How best to tackle Purcell’s so-called semi-operas? The Fairy Queen is an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the magnificent music ancillary to the spoken play. Glyndebourne did it straight(ish) in 2009, but that of course necessitated a company of actors as well as singers. David Pountney’s more economical solution in 1995 was to ditch the dialogue and turn Titania, Oberon and Theseus into singing roles. Choreographed by Quinny Sacks, with beautifully imagined sets and costumes by Robert Israel and Dunya Rankova, it makes for a highly entertaining show.

Pountney divides the music into nine Masques, starting with ‘The Fairy Quarrel’ and ending in ‘Marriage and Reconciliation’. What particularly impresses is the sheer energy of the staging. In the second masque, ‘The Town’, Theseus chairs a meeting (in dumb show) while lovers divert themselves under the table to ‘Come, let us leave the town’. This is followed by a tour de force from Jonathan Best: as the Drunken Poet he goes everywhere, from stage to auditorium to pit. In the fourth masque, Pountney gives the songs for Night and Mystery to Titania, the Indian Boy – the cause of her quarrel with Oberon – lying on a bed. Purcell’s ravishing music for Sleep is taken by the Poet, drunken no longer. Another set piece, the Masque of the Four Seasons, forms part of a divertissement, ‘The Birthday of a Curmudgeon’: not Oberon, as in the original, but Theseus, played by a grumpy Richard Van Allan. Summer is Michael Chance in boater and blazer; Winter is the birthday boy, who emerges as Hymen at the end. There’s more exuberance in the scene for Coridon and Mopsa; Pountney rather misses the joke by not having Mopsa in drag.

Tom Randle and Yvonne Kenny are excellent as Oberon and Titania, Kenny particularly fine in the usually tedious ‘Plaint’. The dancing is imaginative and amusing, and the ENO forces under Nicholas Kok could have been performing Purcell all their lives. Highly entertaining, as I said, but for something nearer to the real thing you need Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne production, bonking bunnies and all.