First Night

Veteran TV director Chris Menaul serves up a polished but hammy farce set around the staging of ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’ in a country house. The story mirrors the romantic intrigues of Mozart’s opera as various folk, including Richard E Grant’s industrialist-turned-singer and Sarah Brightman’s conductor, hook up with each other but only after negotiating a minefield of mistaken identities and other misunderstandings by day and night. While such hilarities are the bread and butter of operas, they don’t translate well to film, and Menaul does little to allay the stagey high jinks of the whole enterprise. The singing – dubbed on afterwards – is fine, but the standard of acting is poor beyond belief. What happened to Grant’s career that he should be in the likes of this?