By 1737, the taste for Italian opera in London was on the wane while its greatest proponent, George Frideric Handel, had suffered a mild stroke. That season’s money-spinner turned out to be an English language satire on English taxation policy and a send up of foreign musical ways by John Frederick Lampe called The Dragon of Wantley (in which a tippling knight errant reluctantly gets into a battle where he merely wounds his furious opponent in the backside). Faramondo, with its a torturously convoluted plot of blood feuds, sibling rivalry and babies swapped at birth didn’t stand a chance. In other words, it was not one of Handel’s hits. A pity, as recent recordings and a couple of stagings have revealed it to contain some fine music.

At moments during Paul Curran’s busy, entertaining, generally light-hearted staging – originally for the Göttingen Handel Festival but now making landfall at the inaugural Brisbane Baroque – you could be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into an update of The Dragon. Curran has ideas, and he isn’t afraid to use them. Some of them are funny ha-ha, some funny peculiar, frequently...