Anna Bolena, Welsh National Opera, review

Seldom have I left a performance so exasperated. Welsh National Opera has had the splendid idea of staging Donizetti’s three tremendous “Tudor Queen” operas - too little appreciated today, and a box-office cert in an era hypnotised by anything Henrician and Elizabethan. For this first instalment, focused on the fall of Anne Boleyn, the management has also had the wit to engage a first-rate conductor and some admirable singers. But then it infuriatingly drops the easy catch by plumping for a staging so drab and inept that it beats me how it ever got through planning.

The director Alessandro Talevi and his designer Madeleine Boyd demonstrate no interest in rendering the splendour of a Renaissance court. Insteadthey set the opera in something resembling one of those pre-fab sheds, furnished with benches and dangling light bulbs, into which Ryanair herdsits wretched victims before the hell of boarding.

The costumes are hideous - unflatteringly cut knee-length for the women, and almost entirely black (at least until the Queen implausibly dons a crimson Vivienne Westwood-style ballgown for her execution). Worse, there is no sense of the delicate relationships between royalty, nobility and courtiers on which the plot hinges: everyone looks the same, as though they were votaries of some puritanical religious sect.

I don’t crave period eye-candy, only theatrical imagination. But this production manages the weird trick of being simultaneously vacuousand pretentious. It will be a bitter disappointment to hungry audiences. Unless they shut their eyes and just listen, in which case they will be rewarded. Daniele Rustioni may look about 13, but he has a mature grasp of this thrillingly muscular score, and his urgent, energised conducting put me in mind of the late great Charles Mackerras.

Serena Farncocchia is no great shakes as an actress and her unhelpful costume and coiffure scarcely helped her to convey an impression of the beautiful scorned queen. But her Anna was consistently sung with dignity of phrase and security of pitch, and she gave a riveting account of the superb final mad scene.

Excellent support came from Katherine Goeldner’s impassioned Jane Seymour and Alastair Miles’ baneful Enrico, as well as Faith Sherman’s Smeton and Daniel Grice’s Rochefort. Robert Macpherson coped manfully if squeakily with the higher reaches of Lord Percy’s music. But the director’s fell hand comes close to scuppering the lot of them. Grrrrr.

Until 4 Oct, then touring.

Tickets: 029 2063 6464; (www.wno.org.uk)