It seems a long while since The Merry Widow last waltzed into town. Successive English National Opera managements, keen to portray themselves as cutting-edge and streetwise, neglected operetta in general and Lehár’s Viennese slice of whipped-cream sentimentality in particular.

Now she is back and the result is a step into the past. Having learnt a painful lesson with its disastrous production of Kismet last summer, ENO has turned to tried and trusted producer John Copley, a familiar face at the company several decades ago. As expected, he has delivered a reliable show in a traditional format, but did it really need to look as if it was stuck in a time-warp from the 1970s?