It would be a disturbing six-year-old who could follow all the speech, but most children would have picked up on the texture of Italian. In a witty pun available to adults only, the arrival of the interval left things literally in suspense, as Pinocchio dangled perilously from a noose.The show was aimed at children from six up: any younger and they wouldn’t have benefited from the education stitched seamlessly into the entertainment. The result was a delightful and frank insight into the business of stagecraft, and how the simplest of props, percussive sound effects and (in this case) rather elaborate costumes can be used to decorate and enhance the play.
Most of the set-pieces were enchantingly done, especially the birth of Pinocchio, in which Vittorio Cosentino’s carrot-mopped Geppetto released his supine form from a block of wood like Frankenstein running volts through his monster. The adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s original was the work of Peter Biddle, while director Martin Duncan of the Nottingham Playhouse cleverly harnessed the Kismet’s technical inventiveness. The mawkish maw of Walt Disney gorges on any fable that folk literature can sling at it.

Any initiative to repossess narratives purloined by Hollywood and excise the all-American show tunes deserves all the applause it can muster. Teatro Kismet did just that with their spritely production of Pinocchio. A band of strolling players in the old style, the company broke with tradition by working for the first time with a writer, and an English one at that. It’s an interesting might-have-been, certainly; but hard to credit as an operatic lost leader.. One of the depressing things about reading to your children is that most fairy tales are already known to them on video.

Written in 1707 as an experiment in native opera seria to oust the popular theatre of which The Island Princess is a good example, it might have created an English national opera – had not bad luck denied it performance at the time. With Stephen Varcoe (Jupiter) and Susan Gritton (Semele) leading a strong cast, Richard Hickox and Collegium Musicum 90 worked hard to make amends for centuries of neglect, though all the fine music could not redeem an interminable plot. Though a sacred Villancico de miserere by Jose de Torres was a vision of beauty from a native school of sacred music, the real surprise was a Xacara of the Nativity, a church drama that once packed them in the aisles of Malaga Cathedral and delighted the modern audience by the same means of robust, streetwise dance rhythms from the Spanish folk tradition.By contrast, early 18th-century arias by Sebastin Durn and Antonio de Literes showed a copious if genteel invention that was also typical of Eccles’ Semele, revived on 27 June at Stationers’ Hall as part of the City of London Festival. At home in their travesty roles, counter-tenor Nicholas Clapton and tenor Arwel Treharne Morgan offered amusing theatre, while the music gained dramatic conviction by clearly touching the pulse of popular feeling.This proved equally true at Al Ayre Espanol’s concert on Thursday 29 June, also at St James’s, of Spanish music from the same period.