Die Fledermaus, New Theatre, Cardiff

Welcome to a night in hell

A lot of thought must have gone into the choice of Calixto Bieito, the "controversial Spanish director" as the press release admiringly describes him, for WNO's Fledermaus, which opened in Cardiff last week. And certainly, thought went into the staging. Strauss's music, Bieito observes, "is superficially happy, but it is a happiness that conceals a hypocrisy". As for the production, it is "an eternal party. It goes on everlastingly, round the clock, in the same location. It is a kind of hell..."

As controversy, this has the sublime virtue of plain stupidity, but as self-criticism it is bang on the nail. If there were hypocrisy in Die Fledermaus, the music would reveal it. (How could it conceal it?) But "a kind of hell" is a neat enough comment on the staging. From the moment that Adele flutters on in what looks like the lounge bar of the Merthyr Tydfil Metropole the morning after a rugger knees-up (designed by Alfons Flores), we know we're for it. And by gum, Bieito makes sure we get it, right in the you-know-where.

My language, you understand, conceals a hypocrisy. His does not, nor does that of his English dialogue-writer, Mark Ravenhill. Here all is honest, bugger-me, Christ all-bloody-mighty, pull down your trousers and stick it up your crutchery. Strauss's characters – at long, long last – are real people. They piss into the potted palms, grope each other (and themselves) – like, I expect, every member of the audience in that concealing darkness – and probably look at child pornography on the internet, though for some reason Strauss's music forgot to conceal that one.

So trenchant is this critique, so fearlessly honest in the face of that most cringing of all hypocrisies, good taste, that one hardly notices the wreckage of Strauss's scenario: the wholesale scrapping of the prison and the gaoler Frosch, the pre-empting of almost every minor plot device, above all the elevation of Falke (Richard Whitehouse) from a vaguely sinister prankster into a self-melodramatising prig. One hardly even notices the tedium of these vulgar, repetitive, Jerry Springer antics; boredom, in any case, is obviously a hypocrisy – the mind's cloak for the sheer terror of engagement.

This is, quite simply, a grim, depressing evening, deeply unmusical, coarse, pretentious and devoid of wit. Not surprisingly the singers, treated uniformly like drunks at a wife-swapping orgy, suffer. Geraldine McGreevy's Rosalinde, Natalie Christie's Adele and Donald Maxwell's Frank all fail to ignite. Paul Nilon's Eisenstein is reduced to schoolboy twittering. Only Wynne Evans, the usual joke Welsh tenor Alfred, and the Orlofsky, Sara Fulgoni, duck momentarily out of the scrum. Claude Schnitzler conducts routinely.

To 27 September (029-2087 8889), then touring