There's something about Herbert Wernicke's staging of Tristan und Isolde, the first of the Royal Opera's new productions this season, that reminds me irresistibly of hamsters. Breeding the rodents is a tricky business; they don't get on very well, and getting a pair to mate has to be approached carefully, bringing them together just for a few minutes to do the business and then separating them before they can kill each other. Wernicke treats these most famous of operatic lovers like that too: his set (he's done everything, including the lighting) consists of two colour-coded boxes - blue for the boy, blood red for the girl - and Tristan and Isolde are never allowed to leave these domains, as if close contact would cause them to tear each other limb from limb. Even in the second act the hamsters - sorry, the lovers - never approach within 10 yards of each other, never exchange glances; their boxes move suggestively together and the lighting becomes more elaborate as they get worked up, but that's about it.
The director may be making the valid point that Tristan and Isolde's love is not only artificial (triggered by the love potion that Brangaene administers at the end of the first act), but also a self-centered emotion; that they are in love with the idea of being in love rather than with each other. But that is a very cerebral reading, and when it is combined with wooden acting from the two principals - their risible gestures should have gone out with Victorian melodrama - the result is desperately vapid.
There are pitifully few other dramatic ideas: sailors in blazers and puttees greet King Marke's first appearance through megaphones and Tristan pulls himself on to Melot's sword at the end of Act 1; Brangaene's warnings in the second act are signalled by a wandering torch beam, for all the world like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, and she takes poison just before Isolde launches into her Liebestod. It's not enough.
The protagonists sound as if they are singing through megaphones. The Isolde, Gabriele Schnaut, seems incapable of anything less than fortissimo, and if the Tristan, Jon Frederic West, cannot quite match her volume he certainly equals the unpleasant acidity of her tone; they make an uningratiating couple. Even the Kurwenal, Alan Titus, barks rather than sings his lines; there was no chance of respite, so that at the end of the first act my ears were ringing as if I'd just sat through a Metallica concert. The only distinguished contributions come from Petra Lang's Brangaene, a real presence on stage, vocally and dramatically, and from Peter Rose's eloquent, touching Marke; but no one goes to a performance of Tristan und Isolde to hear those roles.
Bernard Haitink has craved to conduct this work at Covent Garden for the past 10 years; he obtains superb playing from the ROH Orchestra and brings his usual transparency in Wagner to the score. But the performance never catches fire as it should; when no passion is being generated on stage it must be hard to supply it all from the pit. Haitink made no secret of his dislike of the Richard Jones Ring at Covent Garden, which he conducted so loyally and so well; now, with a production of Tristan that summons up less dramatic energy in four hours than that Ring managed in any four minutes, he will have his work cut out to make it convincing.
• In repertory until November 9. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
