The Return of Ulysses review – in-the-round Monteverdi doesn't hang together

Three years ago the Royal Opera mounted its first ever staging of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Roundhouse in north London. Sung in English and directed in-the-round by Michael Boyd, it was widely admired, and evidently regarded as successful enough for the company to have decided to return to the Roundhouse with more Monteverdi. As before, the production involves young performers, while the Early Opera Company supplies the orchestra, this time conducted by Christian Curnyn, but the results are nothing like as convincing as Orfeo was.

The Return of Ulysses is, of course, a very different kind of opera, written for a wider audience and a much larger venue. It’s an exploration of intimate, personal relationships – husband/wife, father/son – played out on a more discursive scale, and John Fulljames’s production never really manages to reconcile that ambiguity. With designs by Hyemi Shin and Kimie Nakano, the drama is presented on a circular walkway that slowly revolves, with the orchestra at the centre turning even more slowly in the opposite direction. But it commutes between vague time-travelling naturalism – breastplates and military fatigues for Ulysses and his son Telemachus – and something more elliptical and playfully abstract, so that bunches of white balloons, which the glutton Irus (Stuart Jackson) bursts so gleefully, stand for the flock of the shepherd Eumaeus (Mark Milhofer). As if to suggest a society still recovering from the privations of a war, Penelope is seen dispensing food to the local people, but generally the use of a community group for chorus and movement seems a dubious one, and never works as effectively as it does so often in Birmingham Opera Company’s productions, for instance; here those contributions seem self-consciously grafted on to the more musically adept central drama.

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Roderick Williams and Christine Rice take the roles of Ulysses and Penelope, though on the opening night, Rice was suffering from a throat infection and could not sing, and walked through her role while Caitlin Hulcup sang, with great warmth and poise, from among the orchestra. It worked as well as it possibly could, but it was Williams who inevitably became the centre of attention, delivering every line of Christopher Cowell’s translation with immense care and an even, beautiful tone, in a quietly assertive performance.

But it doesn’t all hang together, and Fulljames has one final idea that makes the last scene less warmly reassuring than usual. It’s clear that Samuel Boden’s sulky Telemachus has not forgiven his father for his long absence, while Penelope and her husband end the opera moving apart, as if their reconciliation still has some way to go. That sense of something unfinished rather sums up the evening.

• At the Roundhouse, London, until 21 January. Box office: 0300-678 9222.