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The fundamental situation presented by The Marriage of Figaro is one familiar from many earlier comedies, not least those of Moliere. We see a household dominated by a `dark paterfamilias, the Count Almaviva, who is blinded by an egocentric obsession: in this case his heartless compulsive philandering. In the shadows cast by his selfishness and ill-temper are his wife, the unhappy Countess, and a pair of young lovers, who are planning to get married, Figaro and Susanna. And if this were a conventional working out of the theme we should expect to see the story ending with the Count, as its chief dark figure, going through a change of heart, thus bringing him back together with his wronged wife and simultaneously paving the way for the union of the young lovers.

But Figaro presents us with a number of twists to the usual formula which lend a peculiar ambiguity to the relationships in the story, giving it unusual psychological force.

For a start there is the ambiguity of the young lovers' relationship to the couple at the head of the household. In a conventional comedy one of them would have been the child of the Count and Countess. Here they are not related to the Count and Countess at all, and it is implied that they may all be of similar age (although this is ambiguous). This means that, although Figaro and Susanna are servants and socially inferior, they are, in human terms, on much more of a level with the Count and Countess. Secondly, there is the mysterious and shadowy role played in the story by the two lesser couples: on the one hand the elderly Dr Bartolo and Marcellina; on the other the young Cherubino and Barbarina as a second, lesser pair of young lovers. Thirdly, there is the curious way in which the unfolding action emphasises that the ultimate point of the story is not to bring Figaro and Susanna together, which happens some time before the end: but to bring the Count back into repentant and loving union with his Countess. It is the Count whose dark state poses the overwhelming problem of the story, casting a blight over everyone else, throwing his household into chaos. Until that is resolved, not even the union of the lovers can bring a truly happy ending.

When the story opens all seems sunny and normal, as Figaro and Susanna are busily engaged on mundane details of their forthcoming nuptials. But even the fact that they are both preoccupied with different things (he measuring the room for a bed, she dreaming of her hat) is a small subconscious sign that people in this world we have entered are shut off from one another; and gradually we learn that beyond the sunlit foreground a double shadow is looming over the happy pair. First Susanna reveals that the Count has amorous designs on her, which throws Figaro into a jealous rage against the Count. Then Figaro himself confesses that he has recklessly allowed himself to get into the position where, in return for an unpaid debt, he is contracted to marry the elderly Marcellina. In other words, he has passed into a curiously oblique echo of the classic Oedipal situation where a young man finds his way forward to a mature and independent relationship with his feminine `other half' barred by the double obstacle of antagonism to a male rival, representing threatening masculine authority, and an equally retarding tie to a powerful older woman.

But the action of the first act is in fact dominated by another character altogether, the young page Cherubino: and as soon becomes apparent his role in the story is essentially symbolic. With his name resonant of a little boy god of love, Cherubino's only obvious characteristic is his insatiable, adolescent desire for love. He is like a personification of the restless love-urge, immature, unchannelled, egocentric (and therefore without any content of real love), which is precisely the problem which, in a much darker form, afflicts the Count and is the central problem of the whole story. The point of Cherubino's