Opera, in the hands of its masters, is the greatest art form of them all. And it all dates back, so the legend goes, to Monteverdi and Orfeo. Though not quite the oldest, Orfeo remains one of the earliest operas of which we are aware. Two years ago, it celebrated its four-hundredth birthday. It isn’t opera in the clichéd, cartoon sense. What we have instead is a piece of light entertainment, albeit one with a moral (self-restraint is a virtue to be cherished).

Typically, it’s based on Greek myth. Orfeo is in love with Eurydice, who then dies. He bravely traipses off to the underworld, and is given the chance to lead her out from hell on the sole condition that she follows behind him, so that he can’t look at her. Predictably, that’s exactly what he does, so Eurydice vanishes. All that is left is for Apollo, the Sun God, to descend from the sky, console his grieving son, and drift up with him into the stars.

Unfortunately, this production rarely makes it to entertainment. The brass fanfare that opens the work lacked any sort of drama, and was out of tune. Indeed, the playing of the University Baroque Ensemble left a lot to be desired throughout the evening. There was little rhythmic bite, cadences were regularly mistimed, and the offstage brass in Act 3 petered into half-life, woefully flat, as if nobody had brought them in.

The opening brass are followed by a prologue, in which Music waxes lyrical on the wonders of her art. Unfortunately, her acting was so wooden that it brought across no inkling that she believed in the power of music. This wasn’t helped by the two on-stage accompanists roughly trying to hide their copies of sheet music as they departed the stage.

Act 1 saw the first dance (more accurately described as lopsided group hopping), and with it, the mistimed choreography that plagued the performance, especially in the final, moralising chorus, in which hand movements seemed to appear at random. We also glimpsed our first set: a garden backcloth which looked like it had come straight out of a children’s fairytale, coupled with a solitary and none too convincing rock.

Set design issues continued after the interval. When Orfeo attempts to get past the guardian of Hades through the charm of his music, he sings in front of a zebra-patterned screen, with Charon’s boat intermittently surrounded by a fug of smoke, so liberally applied that it cascaded into the orchestra pit.

There were also serious costume problems. Charon looked perturbingly like a cat thanks to his smeared face paint (and he fell asleep as if he was having a heart attack). Act 4 featured such hellish demons as a pig and a winged frog, both of whom wore masks that would not be out of place in a cheap fancy-dress shop. Hades had all the menace of afternoon tea, not helped by the costume that made Pluto look like a sorcerer. The final act saw Apollo descend from the sky incrementally, preceded by a Rapunzel-esque plume of yellow fabric, attached to a balloon basket that looked oddly like Wedgwood pottery. Hope shot a knowing look offstage as she struggled with the sheets.

On the singing front, Orfeo and the Messenger were in a class of their own, the latter bringing genuine stage presence which showed what was missing from the rest of the cast, who generally lacked both vocal power and emotional pull.

It can’t be denied that a great deal of effort must have been put into this production, but it looks and feels faintly amateurish, lacking in imagination, giving the impression that it’s being put on in a rural town hall. By David Allen