Though stylishly conducted and strongly cast, this 2006 revival of Dario Fo’s 1994 Pesaro production of L’italiana in Algeri seemed strangely bereft of comic élan in the CD version (Dynamic, 4/07). Why was this? Did Fo’s production corral the singers and bore the audience?

The DVD provides a somewhat equivocal answer. During Act 1 the principals do indeed find themselves marooned amid a menagerie of pantomime animals and a troop of largely irrelevant extras. Act 2, by contrast, is cleverly staged and beautiful to look at.

Listening to the CDs, I had wondered why Marianna Pizzolato made virtually nothing of Isabella’s celebrated exclamation “O che muso!” (“Oh what a mug!”) when she first sets eyes on Mustafà. The answer is, she isn’t looking at him. Fo is too busy whirling the singers round the stage in wicker-work flying machines. I also wondered why, with so accomplished a stage comedian as Bruno de Simone as Isabella’s elderly admirer Taddeo, the great duet “Ai capricci” wasn’t more focused. The answer here is: zebras. Zebras and the fact that, again, Fo makes no attempt to replicate in human terms the comedy that is playing out in Rossini’s music.

It is not until the Act 1 finale that he begins to engage with the opera. The recognition scene between Isabella and Lindoro is beautifully staged and lit. The famous stretta (“din din, tac tac, cra cra, bum bum”) would have worked wonderfully if Fo had stuck with the dumb show behind the gauze. But no, the pantomime animals have to come ambling in, along with a troupe of (not very competent) jugglers. The great set-piece ensembles of Act 2 are more economically staged, Fo helping his Isabella, rather than hindering her as he does for most of Act 1, by making her the still centre of the arias “Per lui che adoro” and “Pensa alla patria”. (There is a completely irrelevant Tour de France style pile-up in the latter, with the bicycles not the riders “wittily” carried off on stretchers, but that is Fo’s only aberration.) The scene-within-a-scene as the lovers set sail for Italy is visually memorable.

A curate’s egg of a production, then. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s Metropolitan Opera staging, with Marilyn Horne as Isabella (DG, 7/07), is the safer buy.