Updating Don Giovanni to the time of Franco's Spain, with Mozart's anti-hero transformed into a jackbooted bully, makes as much - or as little - sense as many another gloss on the old familiar story. But at least, if well enough realised, the idea does not lack possibilities. The trouble with Jonathan Munby's production for English Touring Opera was that it went nowhere, though it was not just this that undermined the company's opening night at the Perth Festival. With Roland Wood and Jonathan Gunthorpe as master and servant, the two male leads seemed so utterly miscast, so maladroitly portrayed and so lacking in vocal resonance that the show was scuppered from the start.

A Giovanni without a Don is a defect hard to survive, but the women did their best in the circumstances. Julia Sporsen's Swedish Donna Anna negotiated the intricacies of her big Act Two aria with a warmth rare in exponents of the role, making you actually believe there was some hope for her relationship with the Icelandic Eyjolfur Eyjolfsson's stick of an Ottavio. Laura Parfitt's Welsh Donna Elvira was perfectly competent and Ilona Domnich's robustly Russian Zerlina quite convincing.

With Adrian Powter's flustered Masetto and Andrew Slater's refreshingly scary statue as ballast, this was not the worst ensemble imaginable, despite the shortcomings at the top. What held things together were the sombrely latticed Spanishry and backlighting of Soutra Gilmour's decor and Michael Rosewell's trimly experienced conducting of the undersized orchestra. Though the opening sonorities were feeble, there was vivacity later and real attention to vocal embellishments, even if recitatives (voiced in what sounded like a hybrid translation) were limp.