Anyone staging Handel must decide what to do about the da capo arias: those five-minute solos when the action freezes while one character emotes at length.

Christopher Alden hits on an ingenious solution in his witty new English National Opera production of Handel’s 1730 comedy. Since the arias are essentially snapshots of mood, why not include a photographer actually taking snaps - photos that are then gradually pieced together to reveal a hidden picture of inner tensions and desires?

Indeed, why not turn one of the opera’s characters into the 20th century’s most celebrated photographer? And if you are including Man Ray, why not set the show in a quintessential Man Ray milieu – a sleek white 1920s salon populated by buttoned-up Brideshead types who lounge moodily, tying themselves in romantic tangles and nearly exploding from the repressed anguish they feel? Add a very inventive new English translation by Amanda Holden that seems plucked straight from P. G. Wodehouse (“Crikey!” cries Partenope, when one of her three suitors rips off a false moustache and reveals himself to be a her). The result is a quirky but not incongruous context for one of Handel’s most subtle explorations of confused people in love.

There is one awkward fly in the ointment. Emilio, the Man Ray character (gleefully played by John Mark Ainsley) is, in Handel’s original, a military commander who goes to war against Partenope when she spurns him. But that merely gives Alden the chance for another nifty evocation of 1920s surrealism. Emilio sings his warring aria while arranging an arty battlefield tableau for his camera.

What slightly lets the evening down is some variable singing. That is disappointing in a house that has often echoed to glorious Handelian lyricism. For all his machinegun semiquaver runs and clownish embellishments, Ainsley was not always in tune. And Rosemary Joshua, in the title role, never displayed the tone or control to deliver Partenope’s fiendish coloratura with pure intonation, or the top notes with lustre. A pity, because her Kristin Scott Thomas looks were apt and her acting wonderfully spirited.

Around her, however, were some classy performances. Patricia Bardon was compellingly neurotic and funny as a wronged woman set on embarrassing her straying lover (Christine Rice, in luscious voice) by dressing as a man and competing with him for Partenope’s love. The counter-tenor Iestyn Davies sang winningly as a Chaplinesque bumbler who, in spite of himself, ends up getting the girl. The rising young baritone James Gower seized his chance as a preposterous hanger-on. And, in the pit, the Baroque specialist Christian Curnyn coaxed stylish, assured and often thrillingly swift playing from the ENO orchestra in one of Handel’s jolliest scores.

Box office: 0871 9110200

Editor's choice

• Guns N’Roses: Chinese Democracy
• The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009
• Quantum of Solace