Der fliegende Holländer, Irish National Opera review - sailing to nowhere

So much looked promising for Irish National Opera’s first Wagner: the casting, certainly, the conductor – Music Director Fergus Sheil knows and loves this music – and the venue (the Libeskind-designed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, proven ideal for Richard Strauss). How could a production go wrong with such a theatrical romantic tale, a pioneering music-drama for its time (1843)? All too easily, it seems, by either coming up with inappropriate business or letting the singers stand and deliver.

Yes, we had blood-red sails and the deck of a ship for Wagner's Act One, which will come as a relief to those who’ve seen recent productions without a whiff of the sea. Video projections, though a tad Mills & Boon, helped the myth of the sailor doomed to sail the seven seas until he finds redemption from a woman who swears fidelity unto death. Francis O'Connor‘s stage design was good – albeit with too many trip/fall hazards which caused three near-casualties last night – but the lighting seemed to require spotlights on singers that kept faltering. The real problem was how little Rachael Hewer's direction energised the story.

Hewer was responsible for one of the great delights of Lockdown – her new VOPERA (Virtual Opera Project) semi-animation of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges. Yet Wagner's human scene got off to a bad start with too much action to accompany the Overture. Wagner’s tone-poem of the sea and shifting emotions doesn’t need any, but if you must, the first image of the child Senta disturbed by a storm and then calmly reading, or having read to her, the story of the Flying Dutchman isn't such a bad idea. Hewer then just marked time, giving up on following the musical images, and took attention away from the orchestral sea-swell by making you wonder who all these women were giving Senta things (I’m still wondering). Centring came with the voices, splendid ones in the case of resonant bass James Creswell's Sea Captain Daland, Gavan Ring's perfect lyric-tenor Steersman – reminding us that the brief role is more rewarding than that of Senta's hapless whining-bully suitor Erik, gamely taken by Toby Spence who's not much helped by having to wear a bloodstained butcher's apron throughout – and the male chorus. Vocally, too, Jordan Shanahan's Dutchman was perfect and faultless throughout the voice, with a handsome upper range so important for this role (he should be a fine Barak for a director who really gets results, however controversial, Tobias Kratzer, in the Deutsche Oper Berlin production of Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten).

Visually, though, his emergence from the tattered sails was a nothing – apart from the archaic costume, no hint of other worldliness. Shanahan (pictured above with Creswell) isn't a tall, imposing presence, but lighting and appearance could have helped more here. Hewer wants to show us that fundamentally the Dutchman is a decent bloke, concerned to keep the Steersman warm while he sleeps, but other than that there was ineffectual pacing. no cosmic weariness other than in the voice. The end of the act confirmed that stasis would be the keynote, with unnecessary business from the Steersman to detract from what the two captains were singing to each other. We had an interval here, following Wagner's three-act version (his best solution runs continuously; here, the second and third acts were conjoined). After it, enter the ladies, working in the fishing industry and asked to execute embarrassing steps of what always sounds like the prototype of the chattering weather chorus in The Pirates of Penzance (Stefanie Dufresne, who did a perfectly good job on INO's pocket Fledermaus, came up with something even worse for the sailors in Act Three). Carolyn Dobbin's Mary is a vivacious standout, and as surrogate mother to Senta and wife to Daland becomes much more than the usual harridan-housekeeper cipher. Giselle Allen has the heft for the verses of Senta's ballad about the mythical figure on whom she's long fixated, but at this stage in her career it's a stretch which she only just carries off. Still, a sympathetic presence goes a long way towards us feeling her emotions.

Until, that is, what should be the still, transformative centre of the opera, the starstruck duet for the doomed man and his potential redeemer. At the one point where Hewer could really just let the characters be, she has the dutiful girl carry on slicing up things at a table (Allen pictured above with Shanahan and Creswell). Apart from the point that the Dutchman moves to help her, which again takes the Decent Bloke line, the magic of this great duet is sabotaged. The visuals are strong enough for the animation of the Dutchman's ship in the next act – you really need the luxury of a double chorus; the ghost sailors sound pre-recorded, though they're actually the New Dublin Voices – but we're back to stand-and-deliver for the final tussle. The curtain is as naff as the dumb-show in the Overture. So, despite stalwart singing, and some bold playing from the orchestra under Sheil (trombones especially), this is the first INO production I've seen that simply doesn't fly.

• Further performances at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on 25, 27 and 29 March
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk