Like Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Mozart’s Così fan tutte can make for a thorny piece of theatre in the 21st century. At its best it makes fun of women, at its worst it is frankly hugely misogynistic and in an era in which #metoo raises questions about how men sexually exploit women, a story in which two young men place a bet on their girlfriends’ virtue and then set out to cheat them into infidelity isn’t ideal viewing.

But the opera is what it is and to give WNO their due they tackle the subject in an interesting way.

The opera’s sub-title is The School for Lovers and director Max Hoehn and designer Jemima Robinson take that idea literally and set the production in a classroom. The lovers are all students, Don Alfonso, the man who initiates the bet, is their teacher and Despina, who encourages the women into infidelity, is a dinner lady and cleaner at the school.

In some ways this works brilliantly. When the young lovers reach fantastic heights of hyperbole in their descriptions of each other and their optimism that love lasts for ever, there is a childish innocence about it - they have yet to have their hearts broken and discover romance isn’t always all roses.

But there are moments when it jars. The character of Don Alfonso feels particularly sordid as a school teacher encouraging male students into deceiving their girlfriends and trying to catch them out and Despina’s urging to the girls to live life as they want to has a sense of the pander to it. One can’t help but wonder whether these adults should be working in a school at all!

And when the lovers decide on a hasty marriage, the move from school uniform to wedding gowns leaves us questioning whether they are actually old enough to tie the knot.

Robinson’s set fills the schoolroom with large anatomical drawings of reproductive organs, hugely suggestive images of fruitful nature plus pictures of the Garden of Eden with the suggestion that the students have been taking part in a sex education class. Those images are pulled into play at various points to underline the fact that love is actually something much more about biology and sexual impulse than romance.

And it is this tongue-in-cheek naughtiness which saves the day on the production. It’s all so firmly in opera buffa tradition of blatant silliness that we can go along with the story. The production plays to this again and again with Despina running around in an apron and yellow washing-up gloves, the boys dressed as hippies and the girls swooning with delirium. It is so daft it is laugh-out-loud funny.

The lead performances and singing are wonderful. Rebecca Evans’ Despina is so cheeky she is irresistible and we understand how the girls follow her encouragement. Sophie Bevan gives us a tormented Fiordiligi who fights the temptation offered by the handsome stranger, desperate to remain true to her lover. Kayleigh Decker is a more moonstruck Dorabella, rapidly won over by the charms of the new man.

James Atkinson as Guglielmo and Egor Zhuravskii as Ferrando layer on the humour, particularly when they return in disguise. And Stephen Wells’ Don Alfonso is the arch manipulator whose lesson for the boys is that così fan tutte - which translates as ‘all women are like that’.

At more than three hours, Così fan tutte demands a great deal of the WNO orchestra and, conducted by WNO music director Tomáš Hanus, they ensure the music is as much a character as those on stage.

While we may not like the story’s message, WNO’s method of telling has a lot going for it, offering us a new and irreverent take on a classic comic opera.

Four stars

Reviewed by Diane Parkes at Birmingham Hippodrome on Friday 10 May.