Unveiled at this year’s summer festival, Glyndebourne’s Falstaff now sets off on tour without its original director, Richard Jones, whose production of another musical comedy, Annie Get Your Gun, has just popped up at the Young Vic. That’s a pity, because Jones really needed to lasso his witty but brittle staging into lither comic shape — and, for all the attentive work by the revival’s director Sarah Fahie, it still isn’t quite there.

That may be partly due to one rather perverse decision. “A very English hoot” The Times called the show back in May, and the cosy 1940s Windsor evoked in Ultz’s designs sets up a world that Glyndebourne on Tour’s audiences should easily recognise. So why not perform Verdi in English, especially since more than half the cast are Brits? It would certainly be a better advert for Jonathan Veira’s Falstaff — skilfully acted and smoothly sung, but lacking spice and relish in the colouring of the libretto.

Perhaps Veira’s only other weakness is to give in too freely to Jones’s central, anti-comedic premise: yes, this Falstaff is appalling and conceited, but not a fat figure of fun. Instead he is a hustler and schemer that the rest of society depend on to leaven their diet of stodgy bourgeois morality. That’s fine and insightful, but it does need more jollity and warmth along the way — or, as Alice Ford calls it, “the laughter that explodes”.

A few more explosions would definitely be welcome here, particularly in a woolly final act that still looks as if Jones thought that if he put everyone in fairy costumes and turned out the lights then the music would do the rest. Veira is the classiest performer; the rest are a solid, not scintillating bunch, with Elena Tsallagova’s limpid Nannetta and Rachael Lloyd’s sparky Meg Page impressing the most. When he relaxes into his high notes, Nicholas Phan’s Fenton is sensitively done, and Kathleen Wilkinson’s resinous Mistress Quickly has charm.

Much more Verdian fire, though, is needed from Jessica Muirhead’s prim Alice and Guido Loconsolo’s meek milksop of a Ford. Conducting this tricksiest of scores, James Gaffigan draws some warmly vibrant playing from the orchestra and keeps a (mostly) steady hand on the ensembles: he, like the show, just needs to loosen up.

Box office: 01273 813813, to Oct 31, then touring

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010