Miss Fortune, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, review

This is a disaster. Judith Weir has been commissioned to write the music and libretto for a new full-length opera, and the result is both musically and dramatically a limping, flaccid non-starter.

It’s a sacred cow that new works are the lifeblood that will ensure opera’s future, but if Miss Fortune is the best that Covent Garden can do, I suggest that there’s a case for slaughtering this inconvenient beast. There is no intrinsic value in novelty, and our opera houses can flourish as museums of the past.

You don’t have to endorse such an extreme view to see that Miss Fortune misfires – or rather splutters out. Adapted from a Sicilian folk-tale, it tells the story in a modern setting of someone at the mercy of fate who has it all and loses it, wins it back via the Lottery and then throws it away because she realizes how worthless the having of it is – a parable for our money-obsessed times, albeit of a rather familiar kind.

But the problem isn’t the predictable course of the plot so much as the score. It’s not what Britten jokingly called “horrible modern music” – in fact, it often sounds quite nice. But niceness has no place in the extreme world of opera, and this is wishy-washy stuff without belly, genitals or legs. It may tinkle prettily, it may amble gracefully, but it has no oomph. It offers nothing memorable, sexy or powerful. It never makes you sit up and listen.

Whatever you thought of last year’s tabloid sensation, Turnage’s Anna Nicole, at least it hit hard and made gripping theatre: Miss Fortune, in contrast, lasts barely ninety minutes, but all those minutes seem like hours. I should only add that I’m surprised that someone of Weir’s experience – and I loved her quirkily original A Night at the Chinese Opera – could have produced anything so anodyne and inept.

I have no complaints about the quality of the performance, dutifully conducted by Paul Daniel. Chen Shi-Zheng has directed a sparely elegant staging, with cool Tate Modern designs by Tom Pye and some breakdancers imported to pump superficial energy into the proceedings. Emma Bell gives a blowsy but characteristically gutsy performance in the title-role, and the remainder of the cast readily delivers what little is required of them. But their efforts amount to nothing.

Miss Fortune, big Miss Take.

• Until 28 March Box office 020 7304 4000