As everyone knows, the naughty hero of Mozart’s greatest opera gets dragged to hell at the end – but why, exactly? Clue: it is probably not just because he is such an unsupportive boyfriend, and patronising towards the plebs.

The original play in the background, the monk Tirso de Molina’s early seventeenth-century El Burlador de Sevilla, was a diatribe against “secret marriage”, written to illustrate matters raised at the Council of Trent; by the late eighteenth century, in Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s hands, Giovanni’s rebellion – against God and the ordered world – has become more metaphysical, and his doom achieves a level of grandiose Romanticism.
But in a very Age-of-Reason way we are also invited to ridicule superstition and idiocy, and laugh along as Giovanni toys with poor silly Elvira and the others. The fashion these days is to take it all terrifically seriously, so Lloyd Woods’ jovial touring production (until 10 June) makes a welcome change.