Gilbert and Sullivan season wasn’t due to kick off at English National Opera for another few weeks. Too bad that Mike Figgis and the team behind Lucrezia Borgia didn’t get the memo. Padding Donizetti’s second-rate opera (in which neither poisoning nor passion can be dramatised without recourse to rhyming couplets, 4/4 time and a major key) with a series of short-films proved to be the latest in a series of spectacular misfires from first-time opera directors at the Coliseum. A charitable description of Figgis’s cinematic interludes would have them as ‘stylised’, an overblown period homage to Visconti. Less kindly spectators might see these soft-porn episodes as a rather too literal attempt at fleshing-out a fossilised corpse of a very dead opera.

In situating all the action (and believe me there was plenty — lashings of sex liberally spiced with lesbianism and incest) offstage, Figgis conveniently considered his task done, abandoning his fine cast of singers to some of the most rigid park and bark direction seen in recent years. He also failed to address the issue of transition between screen and stage, shifting from erotic melodrama to oom-pah-pah banality with juddering swiftness.

Matters were further sabotaged by Paul Daniel’s translation, whose rhymes were only outdone for gawky predictability by Donizetti’s harmonies. Daniel’s conducting was fortunately rather more skilled, though a lack of coherent ensemble and some serious lapses between stage and pit spoke of less than adequate rehearsal.

What a shame that so much over-hyped foolishness should overpower singing of serious quality. Returning after an outstanding turn as Verdi’s rakish Duke in Rigoletto, Michael Fabiano defied Gennaro’s rather pedestrian arias with a rounded and impressively even sound in his upper extremes. No bad actor either, he is truly a precious commodity among tenors whose prowess seems so often in inverse proportion to their waistline. Matching Fabiano for technical precision, if not quite power, was Claire Rutter’s Lucrezia — pinpoint secure with her embellishments and making the most of her naturally high, bright overtones.

Also impressive was Elizabeth DeShong; making her ENO debut as a fiesty Orsini (female, on this occasion, for no apparent reason), she powered her way through extremes of range and tone with absolute authority, all the while struggling with some of Figgis’s least forgiving direction.

With closed eyes this is about as good a production of Lucrezia Borgia as could be mounted anywhere internationally, a real coup for ENO. Factor in a misguided mise-en-scene, a chorus lingering perpetually in aesthetic semi-circles and a prosaic score, and you have what amounts to a mildly pornographic staging of Gondoliers. There are further performances of Lucrezia Borgia until March 3. Box office: 0871 911 0200 (www.eno.org)