Not quite the world’s first opera, but certainly the genre’s first masterpiece, Monteverdi’s Orfeo is being staged round the world to mark its 400th birthday. I doubt, however, whether it will be clobbered by a production weirder than this obscure and joyless Christopher Alden farrago for Opera North.

He turns the classical legend into what seems to be a particularly nasty game of charades at a druggy fancy-dress party for dissolute rich kids (Etonians, perhaps?) in about 1980. Mind you, Paul Steinberg’s set — a vast, oppressive, doorless chamber into which people scramble through high windows — evokes something menacing in the mental-institution line; while a bizarre ritual in which the cast slap red petals on their foreheads and do a strange routine with their fingers suggests that we have intruded into a brainwashed cult. Either way, you will gather that not much of the original plot remains.

Euridice (the clear-voiced Anna Stephany, looking suitably bewildered) doesn’t die; she is forcibly pinned to a wall with insulation tape.

The same tape trusses her to an equally terrified Orfeo at their “wedding”.

Orfeo himself (Paul Nilon, singing and acting with heroic commitment, considering the circumstances) is taunted, blindfolded, encaged by piled-up furniture and portrayed as a performing freak who long ago crossed the threshold into madness. A haunting final image, in which the anguished Nilon continues to drum rhythms on his armchair after the opera has ended, suggests that the whole spectacle may be a figment of a mind unhinged from reality.

That is an intriguing idea. Another is to have his magnificently florid solos — ultimate showcases for the art of singing, circa 1607 — recorded on stage with a handheld microphone by a creepy fan who turns out to be his dad, Apollo (touchingly played by Ashley Catling). At the end Apollo comforts his agitated son by pointing to the tapes as a guarantee of Orfeo’s “immortality”.

But two neat directorial wheezes don’t redeem an evening that turns what should be one of the most vibrant of Renaissance spectacles into yet another trite depiction of modern-day ennui. It’s as if Alden and Opera North had no faith in Monteverdi’s lyric genius and their own singers to convey a timeless myth without crassly forcing it into a context that doesn’t fit.

Matters aren’t helped by alarming variations in the quality of the band directed by Christopher Moulds.

Still, on stage there are some characterful performances, even if they are more eye-catching than ear-tickling. Amy Freston turns the allegorical figure of La Musica into a deranged cabaret dancer, her long legs twisting into grotesque contortions, and Graeme Broadbent wheels out impressive bass notes as Charon, the boatman who transports souls to Hades. Not that there’s anything as pictorial as a boat for him to row on this drab evening.

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