Conrad Wilson lauds the revival of the first successful British operatic comedy

A NEW production of Albert Herring is always - or should be - an event. More than half a century after George Christie, Glyndebourne's great but diehard founder, advised his audience that this really wasn't ''their sort of thing'', Britten's comedy has been recognised as something more than just a collection of English caricatures, with a central character, first played by the young Peter Pears, whose effeteness did not quite ring true.

It was in Scotland, not England, that Albert Herring was finally emancipated in 1966, and recognised as the first truly successful operatic comedy - a real comedy with serious undertones - ever written by a British composer. Until then, Britten's opera had proved no more than a semi-success (''opinion is divided about Albert Herring'', declared the music critic of the Times in 1954), allowing the darker side of the comedy to get lost in a surfeit of wink-and-slapstick jokes. But Scottish Opera, in the first flush of its own success, re-examined the whole work, taking nothing on trust,

laying bare the psychological undercurrent, and casting a tough Australian tenor in

the role that Pears had

so emasculated.

The transformation was startling. Herring, for the first time, was fully recognised as an opera about ''coming out'' - though whether Albert, offstage, had discovered himself to be gay or heterosexual was left to the audience's imagination. The production, by Anthony Besch, was taken later to Perth Theatre, where it looked and sounded even better in these appropriately small-scale surroundings. Like Scottish Opera's famous Cosi fan Tutte, launched in Perth around the same time, it was a stepping stone in the progress towards the founding of the Perth Festival a few years later.

And now, next week, Herring will be back, in Perth Festival's own new production, as part of an ongoing Britten survey which has already included two of his church operas, Curlew River and The Burning Fiery Furnace.

Perth Festival Opera, no more than a remote possibility in the 1960s, is now the hub of the festival, creating - on what elsewhere would seem a shoestring - exclusively tailored productions which are shown nowhere else. To see Perth's Albert Herring you will have to go to Perth.

With John Currie as conductor and director, the festival company excels in integrated ensemble performances, featuring promising young singers rather than stars, and confining itself to works that fit the theatre and will attract an audience.

So far, there has been a Mozart cycle, a simple and moving production of Gluck's Orfeo and, in St John's Kirk, two of Britten's three church parables. Though there are plans to do the third, The Prodigal Son, Currie felt that this year there should be a break - hence the new Herring which, if it succeeds, may lead to The Turn of the Screw, another Britten masterpiece perfectly suited to Perth Theatre.

Will Currie's be a Herring for the 1990s? Though he is updating it slightly, it is unlikely that he will carry the work's emancipation process any further than it has already gone. On past evidence Currie treats operas at face value, accepting them as they are, and not intruding upon what he sees as the composer's intentions. In an era when such intrusion has become the norm, this can seem quite refreshing.

The work itself remains as it was, and when, at the end, Sid thinks Albert is stealing his girlfriend, Nancy, he is quite possibly right. One of the fascinating features of Britten's operas - as of Mozart's - is the ambiguities they contain.

Much, of course, depends on the personality of the singer playing Albert, the village grocer boy who is dominated by his mum and brow-beaten by local authoritarians.

Played simply as a rustic innocent, the role makes no sense. From the start, Albert has got to seem capable of bursting his shackles.

Currie is delighted to have recruited Mark Wilde, rising young British tenor, who has already sung Ferrando in Cosi under Sir Colin Davis, for this crucial part. But he is equally pleased with the rest of his large cast - Herring needs 13 singers in all - including Linda Ormiston as the puritanical Florence Pike and Australian, Rebecca Nash, as the dubiously aristocratic Lady Billows.

Currie says he regards Herring as ''hilarious naturalistic opera'', which suggests that he will not be suppressing its comic side but not necessarily ignoring its realities. As a story, after all, it treads a tightrope between comedy and tragedy, being based on a Maupassant tale whose Albert (originally called Isidore) died a debauched drunkard. But Britten, we should never forget, opted for comedy, whereby lies the work's enduring success.

n Albert Herring opens at Perth Theatre on May 22. Further performances on May 27 and 30.