Robert le Diable, Royal Opera, Royal Opera House, review

Some twenty years ago, the Royal Opera presented Meyerbeer’s outmoded epic Les Huguenots. Panned on all fronts, the result seemed to preclude any modern revival in the composer’s once-towering reputation.

But with this new production of Robert le Diable, unstaged in London since 1890, the powers-that-be have decided to give it another whirl – and now I distinctly hear the thump of a last nail being driven irrevocably into a musical coffin.

Let’s leave aside the plot’s standard operatic hokum, in which the soul of a 13th-century Norman duke is contested between his papa, a Satanic emissary, and his lovely fiancée. What scuppers the piece is the vapidity of the score, the greater part of which proceeds at a carthorse plod, without any urgency or concision, through shapeless, simpering melody and thinly epicene orchestration.

The first three acts (over two hours) are so deathly uneventful and soporific that the audience slowly froze with tedium. One could hardly blame the droves who quit at the second interval, but they missed a slight upturn in quality and pace though the last forty minutes: there’s a red-blooded romantic duet and a rousing trio which must have inspired a similar number in Gounod’s Faust. But they’re not enough to save Robert from being consigned into my personal hell of eternal damnation.

Laurent Pelly’s production stages the scenario as a self-consciously theatrical Victorian fantasy of medievalism. It’s a reasonable concept, but because Pelly can’t quite decide whether to camp it up ironically or play the pantomime melodrama straight, the result is unconvincing – and pretty hideous too, as Chantal Thomas’ designs seem determined to evoke Spamalot and Day-Glo Legoland rather than Pollock’s Toy Theatres and illuminated manuscripts. The much-vaunted orgy of dead nuns proved a non-event.

The Royal Opera has endured considerable headache casting the leading roles. Bryan Hymel copes manfully with Robert’s high-lying vocal lines, while Patrizia Ciofi, imported on a last-minute mercy dash, sings very sweetly and truly in Isabelle’s showpiece Act IV aria.

But several British sopranos could have done better than Marina Poplavskaya, at her most weirdly wayward as the saintly Alice (a part once favoured by Jenny Lind), and John Relyea makes only a pallid impression as the villainous Bertram.

Daniel Oren conducts. Some of his tempi felt needlessly slow, but that could be simply because I became increasingly desperate for such a wretchedly protracted folderol to hasten to its conclusion.

Until 21 December Box Office 0207 304 4000; www.roh.org.uk