IMAGINE the relief that swept through Glyndebourne as the realisation filtered down that this four-hour opera seria wasn’t going to be, well, serious. Phew! A grateful audience unbuttoned, and by the end they roared the house down.

Nobody does operatainment better than the director David McVicar: exuberant theatricality, elegance and beauty of design, fabulous lighting, slick blocking, neat hoofing, a satisfactory air of expense, even the odd laugh. All this plus a lissom, all-singing, all-dancing superstar sex bomb in the slinky shape of Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra, who could possibly ask for more?

McVicar’s Handel-lite The Prince and the Showgirl set in baroque-theatre Edwardian Egypt actually disdains both audience and composer: the latter a draggy old dude whose marble-arsed characters really need to lighten up, the former a gang of lame brains whom we shouldn’t weary with such tragic concepts as emotion, sincerity, character. But take those away and you are merely fiddling around the edges of the work. The setting, with heavy Raj overtones, lets McVicar brush up against the evils of imperialism and rig the Egyptians in harem pants and other easily removed gear that is dangerously exciting for the cold northerners. Cleopatra and Ptolemy are a pair of mad, despotic kids whose sexual playground is Egypt, and her only aim in seducing Caesar is to get rid of her pesky psycho brother/husband, an engagingly Caligulan creature, and reign alone. But Handel wrote eight arias for Cleopatra (and another eight for Caesar) that he conceivably intended as more than Bollywood song-and-dance routines for a one-dimensional minx. McVicar undermines his characters by vulgarising their motives, notably by having them declaim their soliloquies not alone, but purposely in others’ earshot.

When Cleopatra sings of her grief at Caesar’s supposed death you don’t believe her because it’s done for effect, just like the rest of the show. This whorish applause-seeking castrates the music, robbed of its emotional meaning. Nonetheless, it is beautifully, slickly played by William Christie and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, if somewhat passionless. Sarah Connolly’s Caesar is magnetic, exemplary, though much of it lies too low for the voice to bloom. Patricia Bardon, as the widowed Cornelia is allowed some sincerity of sadness, and Angelika Kirchschlager, as her son, Sesto, produces the evening’s best and most-fiery singing. And de Niese — well, she has plenty to give: I just wish the cause were more worthy of her.

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