A hot night in the Horn of Africa. Black figures sway to a jazzy protest song. A khaki-clad white emerges, takes off the record and breaks it over his knee. Mozart’s overture starts, the sound-track to casual, racist sexual violence. Come the dawn, the soldiers eulogise their fiancées. The hypocrisy is palpable.

The fiancées, when we meet them, exude entitlement and the same casual, unthinking racism as the men. All the same, they are bored; this is White Mischief in Happy Valley, or The Jewel in the Crown. Only, because it is Italian, it is Eritrea in the late 1930s.

Don Alfonso – Rod Gilfry in a crumpled linen suit straight out of a Graham Greene novel – mocks Ferrando’s and Guglielmo’s romantic idolising of their fiancées, and gets their agreement to play a trick on the girls to prove his point. And so his trap is set.
Ferrando (Joel Prieto) and Guglielmo (Nahuel di Piero) return blacked-up as Dubat warriors. Dorabella (Kate Lindsey) and Fiordiligi (Lenneke Ruiten) initially reject their advances, but then, well, with the encouragement of their maid Despina (Sandrine Piau) who’s to know …

There are delicious bits of staging – the soldiers ironing their shirts while the girls drool over their fiancés’ attributes; the furious pasting of Mussolini posters, partially covered by portraits of the beloveds; Despina’s shameless flirting with a houseboy and her revulsion when he reciprocates. It makes for a much funnier production than is usual, the protagonists having forfeited by their insincerity and insensitivity any sympathy their predicament might otherwise have elicited.

It’s also Così fan tutte as Gesamtkunstwerk. Alban Ho Van’s set – a brutalist fort with diamond-pattern screens – the lighting of Dominique Bruguière / Nicolas Faucheux and Thibault Van Craenenbroeck’s costumes create the backdrop to Christophe Honoré’s naturalistic direction. This is no star vehicle. It is ensemble singing of a high order, so sensitive to the music and the emotions that it seems as natural as ordinary speech.

The acting is as important as the singing – frequently and deliberately undercutting the words and music with razor-sharp wit; the surtitles are translated colloquially – ‘Just saying'. The Italian soldiers and Eritrean household staff are both observers and complicit in the trick..

Lindsey is a tart in white shorts, whereas her sister does have some moral sense – the ambiguous ending leaves Ruiten isolated at the opposite end of the stage from the others. The more romantic Prieto also has some moral scruples, unlike the pragmatic, and delusional, di Piero. His lack of self-awareness is most noticeable when singing of the inconstancy of women while perpetrating acts of sexual abuse on the housemaid.

In the pit, the Freiburger Barockorchester, conducted by Jérèmie Rhorer, completes the soundscape and anchors the action

Ah, yes, the adult content of which ticket-holders were warned in advance. All sex acts were fully-clothed and worse has been seen on the Edinburgh stage. Even without that, however, this is possibly the most grown-up and intelligent production of Mozart and Da Ponte’s very adult opera around.