Ridiculous, roguish, repulsive, greedy, fat: Falstaff has to be all these. But he also has to be funny, lovable, masculine, plausible, attractive. The challenge of Falstaff is to create a panorama of character that embraces each of these facets and rounds them into a whole, charismatic enough to motivate the merry wives into playing with him while vulnerable enough to win our sympathy. The women, of course, come out on top, but they have to do so in such a way that makes us admire them, too, as Verdi casts a benign gaze on the sexual gamesmanship that drives all earthly creatures.

These thoughts are prompted by default: the roundedness of Falstaff’s character, for which his girth is only a symbol, is missing from Scottish Opera’s new production. It is partly a question of interpretation, partly a problem of casting. Dominic Hill, artistic director of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, chooses a late 19th-century bourgeois milieu, all top hats, deer stalkers and washing lines, but does not gain enough purchase on it to illuminate why the “fat knight” and his female playmates should mess around with Victorian mores while other men are so hidebound by rules.