There were some odd moments in Wednesday night's performance - disjointed ensembles and awkward speed changes - but enough delight to compensate. Paolo Gavanelli fits Falstaff's fat-suit more comfortably than Bryn Terfel and offsets his character's bathos with a touching pathos. Simon Keenlyside's Ford is the perfect uptight foil to Patricia Schuman's easy Mrs Ford, and Diana Montague and Bernadette Manca di Nissa make a lively Meg and Quickly. Twenty-five-year-old soprano Sally Matthews stepped in to replace Jenny Grahn and conveyed Nannetta's sweet nature without being winsome or irritating.

It was a wonderful debut; her high notes had the purest shimmer and her acting was utterly convincing. Jeremy Sutcliffe's direction is energetic to a fault, but if you have to choose between singing planks of wood and meretricious acrobatics, I'd take the latter any day. A thoroughly enjoyable evening where even the sets were (quite rightly) applauded. 'Falstaff': Royal Opera House, WC1(020 7304 4000) to 30 Jan. The new film Shadow of the Vampire is based on the idea that the production of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's classic expressionist movie Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror was as horrific as the story it told. Ever since the film first opened, at the Marble Hall of Berlin Zoological Gardens (where better?) in March 1922, the circumstances of its making have indeed been shrouded in mystery. Director Murnau (played by John Malkovich in Shadow) never once talked about Nosferatu in a published interview, even though as the film-maker responsible for the great The Last Laugh (1924) and Sunrise (1927) he did give a lot of interviews.

The production company Prana-Film went into liquidation two months after Nosferatu opened, owing a lot of money. The original publicity (which cost more than the film itself) usually emphasised the role of production designer Albin Grau - himself a mystery figure, whose surname means "grey" - rather than the director. And the surname of the The new film Shadow of the Vampire is based on the idea that the production of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's classic expressionist movie Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror was as horrific as the story it told. Ever since the film first opened, at the Marble Hall of Berlin Zoological Gardens (where better?) in March 1922, the circumstances of its making have indeed been shrouded in mystery. Director Murnau (played by John Malkovich in Shadow) never once talked about Nosferatu in a published interview, even though as the film-maker responsible for the great The Last Laugh (1924) and Sunrise (1927) he did give a lot of interviews. The production company Prana-Film went into liquidation two months after Nosferatu opened, owing a lot of money. The original publicity (which cost more than the film itself) usually emphasised the role of production designer Albin Grau - himself a mystery figure, whose surname means "grey" - rather than the director.

And the surname of the leading actor who played the vampire Count - Max Schreck (played in Shadow by Willem Dafoe) - means "terror" in the German language, stimulating all sorts of rumours ever since about whom he actually might have been. The last point is the easiest. "Schreck" seems to have been the actor's real name, he earned a regular living as a character actor in German plays and films up until his death in 1936. Stills of Max Schreck, without vampire-makeup, have survived. He looks almost as cadaverous and scary as he does in his most famous movie. But given the enormous reputation of Nosferatu among film historians today, and given its historical status as the movie which launched the Dracula industry, the silence of everyone involved in its production needs more explanation.Basically, Prana-Film - a production company co-owned by the painter and graphic designer Albin Grau, and run in a very amateur way - had never cleared the film rights to Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. The script of Nosferatu changed all the main characters' names: Count Dracula became Count Orlok, Harker became Hutter, the fly-eating lunatic Renfield became Knock, the heroine Mina became Ellen and Professor van Helsing became Professor Bulwer. The settings changed from Transylvania, Whitby and London to Transylvania and the provincial German town of Wisborg (actually Rostock and Lübeck): the time period moved from the present day to the early 19th century.

The original script, now in the Cinemathÿque Française and written in blank verse, was evidently the springboard for a fair amount of improvisation on location: Nosferatu, unusually for an expressionist horror film, used dramatic real-life landscapes rather than painted or exaggerated sets. And the programme for the premiÿre claimed that the film had been "freely adapted" from the novel Dracula. Grau and friends - who ran their company like a hippie commune, complete with Buddhist logo - thought that all this would keep them in the clear, where legal redress was concerned. Only the year before, Murnau had made an unauthorised version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - called The Janus Head - and he had so far got away with it.It didn't keep them in the clear. Bram Stoker's 64-year old widow Florence, who had been struggling to make ends meet since her husband's death in April 1912, heard about the Berlin premiÿre of Nosferatu and immediately went into battle through the Society of Authors. Dracula was the only one of her late husband's novels for which there was still demand: it was her main source of income. First she wanted to sue Prana, then following the company's bankruptcy she instructed the Society's German lawyer to sue the receivers for the recovery of £5,000, then she decided that the most she could hope for was the removal of the film from circulation.