William Christie and Les Arts Florissants enjoy a deservedly high reputation as pillars of excellence in the world of baroque music. So much so, that their production of Hercules was sold out months before its arrival in London. The opening night was one of the hottest tickets in town, and there was a heady buzz of anticipation as the packed audience found their seats. Excitement rose as the orchestra tuned up and the great man took the rostrum, but then there was an off-putting muddly start to the show, with Katija Dragojevic grappling with the billowing curtains to find where she was meant to sit down, then scrabbling around to extricate Joyce Didonato out from under them! A very bad beginning for a drab staging which unaccountably had been hailed in the programme book as a "visionary combination of music and theatre".

Handel wrote his two secular oratorios within a few months of each other. For Semele he used the libretto Congreve had prepared for John Eccles ill-fated opera (abandoned before it even reached the stage), and thus Handel's work has readily been absorbed into the operatic canon, whilst Hercules has remained somewhat marginalised.

Classicism and satire walked hand in hand during the eighteenth century. London audiences would have been completely familiar with the Hercules legend, and would have looked for a sophisticated multilayered sharpness in the staging to complement the elegance and wit of Handel's music.

The plot is a real cautionary tale if ever I saw one, which could perhaps have been entitled "Dejanira, who allowed jealousy to drive her mad". Even the style of Thomas Broughton's libretto bears some resemblance to one that Hillaire Belloc would use so successfully:

Jealousy! Infernal pest,
Tyrant of the human breast

Luc Bondy seemed to favour a more serious "face value" approach, setting his action in a concrete post-combat no-man's-land with a thick layer of sand covering the stage and scenery comprised of a wrecked statue and a rusting 40-gallon oil drum.

Such dreary surroundings depress the spirit, and the sad lack of audible words (and no surtitles) diminished concentration. Acts 1 and 2 were played without a break, so it was a somewhat battle-weary audience that trooped out at the interval and showed a measure of reluctance to return - indeed a sizable proportion did not.

There were of course, many things to admire. Les Arts Florissants played as stylishly as ever and the chorus provided a resolute and spirited backbone to the drama. Much has been written and superlatives justly abound in describing Joyce DiDonato's agility of voice and her totally rapt and focussed performance. Her slow deterioration into madness was superbly done - although the irreverent thought crossed my mind that some of her head shaking might have been an unconscious attempt to rid herself of sand.

Unfortunately Ingela Bohlin had a throat infection, so she mimed the role of Iole on stage whilst it was sung from the pit, very creditably, by Hannah Bayodi, a member of the chorus. It is simply bad luck that Iole is involved in the only two duets in the piece, where the distance between actor and singer was most disconcerting.

Ed Lyon (Hyllus) produced some fine singing and the best diction of the evening, and Simon Kirkbride (High Priest) made a stirring entry through the auditorium. In the title role, the tall figure of William Shimell easily dominated the stage, but vocally he seemed less at ease with the baroque style.

An evening to remember, but one in which the whole proved somewhat less than the promise of its individual elements.