Not content with making her first venture into opera, the film director Sally Potter has also produced a blog, a video diary and a steady stream of articles in the past few weeks telling us how – as a “risk-taking perpetual outsider” – she intended to strip the Spanish “clichés” from Carmen and bring the “nostalgia-steeped” artform of opera “crackling into the present”.

Oh dear. A little learning may be a dangerous thing, but no knowledge at all is lethal. I can’t remember when I last saw a Carmen full of Spanish clichés. Indeed, it would be novel to see one set in early 19th-century Seville, as Bizet intended.

No, I’m afraid the clichés in English National Opera’s new staging come from the risk-taking perpetual outsider and her designer, Es Devlin. Forbidding walls topped with razor wire; an oppressed populace spied on by CCTV; menacing cops and booted tarts; desultory, neon-lit bars; bodyhoppers and hoodies; dreary airport transit corridors – where have we seen this before? The answer is in most ENO productions since the 1980s. Potter should get out more.

What is saddest is that the staging’s most interesting aspect – real-time video (by Fifty Nine Productions) projected on to a gauze to suggest a society under constant surveillance – is abandoned after one act. Whether that indicates a drying up of rehearsal time, budget or directorial nerve, I don’t know. What a pity that Potter’s blog doesn’t tell us the real inside story.

But what follows is a conventional contemporary staging that presents the protagonist as an independent modern woman – yet one who, inexplicably, goes into paroxysms of terror (and is bathed in lurid red light) when she “sees” death in a pack of cards.

Alice Coote projects the part with beauty, nobility, even delicacy, very different from the brazen blast of the usual Carmens. Her voice has rarely sounded more velvety or lustrous. But her character struck me as too cool, too rational, to get herself into such a fix.

Nevertheless, it’s for her singing, and the strong musical values displayed around her, that you should see the show. Edward Gardner, ENO’s music director, may still be cutting his baby teeth, but he kept a tight ensemble, chose intelligent speeds, and worked up fizzing climaxes. Now he needs to encourage the strings to dig in with a bit more searing passion.

There was plenty of that from Julian Gavin’s José, and a convincing disintegration from haughty security guard (or whatever) to gibbering wreck. But I wish he wouldn’t swallow consonants: Christopher Cowell’s pungent new translation, though it takes audacious liberties, deserves to be heard as well as read on surtitles.

Katie Van Kooten is an unsually powerful Micaela. Indeed, she looks and sounds more of a handful than Carmen does. David Kempster is vocally limited and uncharismatic as Escamillo, for all his gold coat and adoring floozies. But there are lively performances from Fiona Murphy, Elena Xanthoudakis, Andrew Rees, Scott Davies and especially the promising Ronan Collett.

Oh, and two nimble dancers, Lucila Cionci and Pablo Veron, surreally fandango and tango in and out of the action. We have Potter’s assurance that this is deeply symbolic and not a Spanish cliché.

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