Things are pretty rum when colour arrives on stage only with the flowers in the prima donna’s bouquet. Yellow! Red! And wasn’t that green? Such a relief from the black hell we’d been trapped in. Black floor, black clothing, black blood, boxed in by three black walls: that is the operating space in Robert Carsen’s gruelling take on Gluck’s last masterwork, a production given its premiere in Chicago last year (San Francisco saw it this June).

If it hadn’t been for the lighting – shaded white, conjuring giant shadows – or the walls’ graffiti of character names, what would there have been to pick out?

Carsen’s reasoning for stripping away period settings in his opera productions is familiar. Historical clutter distracts and distances; the austere and contemporary sharpen the focus on universal emotions.

But when audiences are alienated through endless tragic poses and tortured choreography in a set with the charm of a Bronx basketball pit, the argument falls down. This was a bad and chilly night at the opera.

Even with Gluck’s music? Some warmth and redemption there, certainly. Singers occasionally need greater room for expression than Ivor Bolton’s swift beat allows, and the Royal Opera Chorus deserves to be liberated from the pit. But the glow and spunk of the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment bring their own delights, even pitched against stage gloom.

And the cast isn’t short of the right juice. Simon Keenlyside, stopped by a bad back from appearing in Chicago, fulfils expectations as the bloodied Oreste, blown by a storm into another Ancient Greek mess. He’s virile, anguished, physically ideal. Paul Groves as his friend Pylade (Carsen avoids a gay subtext) isn’t far behind. Clive Bayley’s Scythian king Thoas is also a tonic, easily suggesting by his brutish voice someone who might just eat people for breakfast.

Over Susan Graham’s Iphigénie, the centrepiece role, hangs a question mark. She’s the veteran of this production’s past incarnations and her authority is secure, particularly in Gluck’s exceptional lamenting aria closing Act II. Even so, there’s a level beyond which Graham doesn’t go. Her kind of suffering is suffering by numbers. It’s finely enacted, and locked into the notes, but we’re not scalped; she’s not taking Iphigénie’s agony personally. Unlike the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Graham is no natural tragedienne.

Inevitably this limits the opera’s drama. Not as much, though, as those sets and costumes (Tobias Hoheisel is responsible) or the silly choreography of Philippe Giraudeau. Or Carsen’s belief that black on black, gloom on gloom, is the best path to enlightenment.

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