THE trouble with The Death of Klinghoffer is easy: whatever I say, half of you will hate me. Those who “like” John Adams’s opera and those who “dislike” it are accused of fascism in equal measure. And those who impute anti-Semitism to the work should bear in mind that the film of it was banned by the (Palestinian) Ramallah film festival last year.

There were plenty of people expecting trouble before this staging by a Scottish Opera revived for the occasion, from political activists to, no doubt, those responsible for selling tickets. In the event none materialised and neither was the theatre full. What this says about public perception of modern opera’s relevance is clear enough. Whether the public is right is another question.

It may, baldly, be about the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro and the murder of the wheelchair-bound American Jew Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists, but Klinghoffer is not, actually, a documentary. Sadly Anthony Neilson, the director, seems to forget this, whether out of desperation or conviction.

Seagulls tweet at the slightest mention of their name, children cavort on the deck of the cruise ship, refugees plod about with suitcases: the illustrative give-aways of a failure of theatrical imagination — even if this work is action-light, contemplative, chatty, tending more to the condition of oratorio.

Every time the work threatens to transcend its subject — a sordid story set to repetitive music, the unkind would say — Neilson brings it thumping back to earth, to the particular, to the sickeningly irresolvable case of the murder of one helpless man by inadequates (but caused, according to flashing titles, by OIL). This is cruelly bathetic: what the opera yearns for is the space to consider a human condition prone to the visitation of evil, the paradoxes of sympathy — where those who feel themselves to be victims turn others into the same — the propensity to classify others as “what” rather than “who”, and its disastrous consequences, and the fact that we have nobody to blame or sort things out but ourselves.

This is not political, simply a mature response to living, and Adams’s opera is well-made text and music whether you like it or not. And except when they descend to caricature the performances here are worthy: Andrew Schroeder’s bombastic, Conradian captain — really the only character to identify with — Darren Abrahams as the improbably intellectual terrorist Molqi, Catherine Wyn- Rogers as Klinghoffer ’s wife, whose lament holds the stage at the end. Edward Gardner, the conductor, controls and paces the score with great feel for its dynamism and structures, largely brilliantly realised by the orchestra. The chorus improves from a rocky start.

And humanity gets the best lines, amplified and glossed in the music. Bombs and bullets are louder than words but they are the gibberish of psychotic children. The fact that Klinghoffer recalls the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from their land has little bearing on that and nor does it justify the shrieking that so often prevents this serious work from being staged.

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