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.

If Hill had had a charismatic, naturally comical centrepiece, his staging might have had more depth and perspective. As it is, Peter Sidhom’s Falstaff is just not preposterous or outrageous enough. Why should these prim women waste their time, never mind risk their reputation, on a bald, frock-coated bumble who can’t stand up without having to rock himself on to his feet? Sidhom’s performance, like the rest of the show, needs a lot more running-in before it achieves the quick-witted fluency that Falstaff demands.

Those qualities are sorely missing from Peter Robinson’s high-spirited, heavy-footed conducting, most noticeably in the ensembles: this is a score that really needs a resident music director in control, or someone with Mozart or Rossini in their armoury. The performance falls back on a series of well-executed and mostly well-chosen gags to amuse the audience. What gave me pleasure was the three-dimensional painterliness of Tom Piper’s semi-realistic set and the beauty of Ben Ormerod’s lighting; after that, the homogeneity of the three leading women, Maria Costanza Nocentini’s Alice, Leah-Marian Jones’s Meg and Lucy Crowe’s Nannetta.

Tel 0870 060 6647