As a callow (and callous) undergraduate, I used my dissertation to tear a strip off Verdi for presuming to toy with the little-understood history and culture of ancient Egypt for the sake of creating fashionably exotic opera. The only problem was, I’d never actually seen Aida. So imagine my misery, when, last week, I sat through it for the first time, only to discover that I was right. Right, and — infinitely worse — bored.

Radames must fight the Ethiopian king, Amonasro, with whose daughter, Aida (a slave at Memphis), he is in love. That’s not a summary: that’s the whole shebang. Alas, Verdi relied too much on the marketability of his setting, at the expense of dramatic or even musical credibility (witness gimmicky little ‘Orientalising’ flourishes on the clarinets and flutes). Barring a couple of hopelessly over-famous choruses and arias, Aida is an uninspired piece. And ENO’s production didn’t save it.

Aida is simply too heavy to work well in English (it may be equally flat-footed in Italian: I can’t comment), and vocally everyone seemed too small for both stage and orchestra. John Hudson (as Radames) was unsuccessfully effortful. Aida (Claire Rutter) seemed to take second place to her accompaniment. Only Jane Dutton (as Amneris, Pharaoh’s daughter and Aida’s rival) was competitive, and even then only when she got wrathful in the low range.

The acting was pretty pedestrian, too. Hudson lumped about stagily like a knackered 2nd XV prop; the pharaoh (Gwynne Howell) did his impression of Alec Guinness doing an impression of an inscrutable Arab. No one actually put hand to brow . . . but it was close. The single most impressive moment was the little temple dance, by four children (Saima Islania, Jaina Modasia, Dhrisha Hirani and Ishira Shah). The most versatile performance came from a collapsible elephant.

The designers (under Zandra Rhodes) clearly had fun, but at too high a cost. The Egyptians look like self-conscious invitees to one of Cole Porter’s parties. The Ethiopians look like Ewoks. And though Rhodes clearly did some homework — the Valley-of-the-Queens stars, the gold caps on the pyramids, the hieratic motifs were all nice touches (though straightforward hieroglyphs would have been less abstruse) — the show is undone by its playroom colour scheme, like some weird 1980s German festival production. Why didn’t they just rework the décor from ENO’s much-loved Magic Flute?

At the 11th hour (or so it felt), with the walls closing in on the doomed lovers, I experienced a solitary flicker of sympathy. The mutual hope for a quick end.

is at the London Coliseum, until November 22. Tickets: £12-£86