It isn't hard to work out why Glyndebourne has waited 74 years to tackle Humperdinck's dark, fairytale opera. A piece about starving kids, staged in the spiritual home of the bulging picnic hamper? Heavens, the very idea could put sensitive patrons off their foie gras.

Indeed, one can imagine a subversive director mounting a production of Hansel that transplanted the Witch's Gingerbread House to Glyndebourne's lawns at guzzling time. Sadly, Laurent Pelly, the French director, is not so bold a spirit. Instead, he lampoons those safely down at the other end of the social ladder.

So Hansel and Gretel's parents are gross, gormless, lager-swigging chavs, living squalidly in a giant cardboard box (Barbara de Limburg Stirum's stunning set). The Witch, first seen in silhouette farcically trying to kick-start her various broomsticks, lures the kids into not a gingerbread house but a supermarket stacked with two-for-one offers on jumbo packs of junk food.

The chronically obese children rescued at the end are clearly victims of these binge-eating enticements. And when the Witch is killed, a “Closed for Good” sign is ostentatiously hung over the store. You get the point. I don't think it's a show that Tesco would be interested in sponsoring.

You can see this as a satire on wasteful consumerism (the petrified forest of Act II has discarded plastic bags hanging listlessly from its branches) or as a tasteless send-up of fat, working-class people.

Either way, Pelly doesn't help his cause by mishandling crucial moments. The dream pantomime is just a lot of white-clad children milling around; it compares badly with the fabulous banquet that Richard Jones's Welsh National Opera production conjured for this scene. And the Witch's death is a limp anti-climax.

What lifts the evening are the beautifully romantic, lovingly nuanced playing of the London Philharmonic under Kazushi Ono's lyrical direction, and the spirited performances of the two main characters. Jennifer Holloway's Hansel is the most realistically boyish I've seen: burly and gauche, perpetually goaded by his exasperating sister. But it's Adriana Kucerova's irrepressibly hyperactive Gretel who steals every scene. I don't think I've seen an opera singer expend so much energy on stage. It's as if she is connected directly to the national grid. Yet the young Slovak's lustrous voice remains surprisingly focused.

Klaus Kuttler's Father is nondescript, and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke's Witch indifferently sung - though his grotesque false boobs and pot belly are the stuff of nightmares. Irmgard Vilsmaier, as a hatchet-faced Mother, sings everyone else off the stage. If she had also doubled as the Witch, Pelly's notion of wicked adults killing kids with junk food would have had an interesting extra twist.

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