Don Giovanni, Arts Theatre, Cambridge

Mozart with a soft centre

When Leporello swaps gear with his master in Mozart's (or as here, the Mozart-da Ponte-Holden) Don Giovanni, the comic turn dates back to Aristophanes and, arguably, to the murky rustic origins of comedy itself.

English Touring Opera's first touring Don Giovanni for 10 years is directed by Deborah Paige, a valuable operatic find who honed her bristly sense of timing with Shakespeare and Arthur Miller in Sheffield and Salisbury's Playhouse.

Paige brings an eye for theatrical detail: like Giovanni and – to his chagrin – Donna Anna, she can sniff round corners. She and her co-director Oliver Mears have worked on some of the principals to advantage, notably on Nicholas Todorovic's Leporello, the lynchpin of this production, a slightly oikish Jeeves who keeps this show on the road. Todorovic is no basso profundo (the natural Leporello here is Peter Grant, a pleasingly bumbling Masetto); but one could easily see him as the Don.

To an extent this was a drama without a centre, for Swede Hakan Vramsmo, trussed for dinner in an apt black sling after an offstage tumble, is – despite a rapist history as Britten's Tarquinius – a rather vapid libertine who, for all his fruity-voice production seems glutinously out of place in Giovanni's liaisons dangereuses. This flickering flick-knife Giovanni is comic, but rarely dangerous. Do we care about his grisly end? Not really. He is witty, laid-back, nicely artful; but not a fraction genital.

This is one of ETO's better offerings (their Macbeth was mixed and their mellifluous Manon, thin). The conductor James Morgan has a good ear for Mozart pacing, and Paige's well-moved (just occasionally stagy) production, with taut entrances and the same intelligent restraint seen in Katie Mitchell's WNO production, was well served by Atlanta Duffy's set – all streaky and mottled greys, blacks and pastels – and by the lighting designer Matt Attwood, whose only slip was a clutch of inept shadows in the final moralising sextet.

There was some nice playing (woodwind for the Commendatore; violins in the catalogue; agreeably unadorned horns; some perky continuo; twiddly flutes for Masetto; cello for Don Ottavio.) Lydia Marchione's Zerlina is cuddly in voice and character, with an agreeable cutting-edge. Pamela Wilcock served up a witty Elvira, issuing in prissy headscarf from her domestic blue wallpaper nook to net her homme fatal.

She was nicely Handelian in declamation, and suitably aghast at Leporello's tattooed, semi-striptease catalogue. The RNCM's Simon Wilding was a promising Commendatore: a strongish bass of a Matthew Best kind, less settled than Grant's Masetto, but on the road to something good.

Darren Abrahams's Ottavio produced some lovely tenor sounds: there was occasional flattening, but his is also a career worth watching. He looked comically liable to be handbagged by Catherine Hegarty's Donna Anna: a dominating Marcellina figure who towers over him like a female Fafner – her impressive voice certainly suggests Wagner – who overcame flu to deliver her early outbursts powerfully, although later the lurgy triumphed, laying low violins and all.