“Cosi Fan Tutte” Grimeborn Festival, Arcola, Hackney

Lesley Anne Sammons’ orchestral arrangement dispenses with the overture. Ably directing from the now fiendishly intricate keyboard score, Sammons loads her keyboard with Mozart’s compressed brilliance, yet clarifies with aplomb and comic vigour. The acoustics though render Amy Baldwin’s fine double-bass-playing scarcely audible. This is stripped-down opera at its most exhilarating. Lit neatly by Jack Hathaway – with little room to innovate – there’s still shadows skulking.

Several of the cast alternate, though the lack of a programme plus the excision of names from the surtitles mean many won’t know who’s who; or on what night which three singers take three of the parts. This might be part of an anonymising aesthetic, yet does singers starting their careers no service at all.

So three of the six roles – Guglielmo, Dorabella and Despina – are played by one of two singers on a given evening: meaning on-stage singers are boosted to nine, allowing ensemble work and heftier choruses; as well as experience for some of these singers entering the profession.

We start with a writhing heap, out of which protagonists are chosen for an experiment by a white-coated clip-boarded Don Alfonso (Joel Robson), perhaps the youngest on record: who takes the role with an excellent baritonal hauteur, mixed with a detachment and forensic question-mark around his singing. Gone is the traditional wise old cynic. Robson invests Don Alfonso with a measure of chrome steel spatula. You imagine him disposing of his samples. That is, till the end.

The charcoal-grey-clad ensemble trio scurry and frolic on the floor like dogs, then the un-chosen three writhe behind the other characters imitating dog-like clones, a bit like the droid round-up scene in Ann Droid.

A bit like Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, a play based on the scientific simulation of love. We’re in an updated world where Don Alfonso’s scientist seems hell bent on proving “all women do it” and female infidelity as natural as breathing: and pushing humans through like lab rats – to change the animal. What could possibly go right? Two sisters are engaged to two men. The wager is they men disguise themselves, come back and court a different sister.

Given the disguise the men undergo as Albanians after the ravishing ‘Soave sia il Vento’ trio costumes are happily swapped throughout. The women chosen add blue skirts like tutus and red sashes till later they don male-like attire denoting a kind of sexual liberation (they act like men, a neat sartorial emphasis, subtler than anything else given the constraints of the libretto). The men from contemporary fatigues and shades return fantastically arrayed with little caps.

The two more serious lovers – though not initially of each other – are played throughout by the same singers. Ferrando (an ardent, sensitive Bartosz Thirde) only later on courts Fiordiligi (Katerina Oikonomou, glowing and rapt, as well as seriously conflicted). On this occasion Guglielmo is sung by Oscar Castellino, giving a magnetically comic performance, the most memorable male role of the evening – though like any raffish male, he has an advantage. He’d make a fine Don Giovanni and in another register, Leporello. Isaac Conibear plays Guglielmo on other occasions, and here swells the ensemble.