It is hard to know whether to laugh, cry or simply despair at English National Opera’s new production of Bizet’s Carmen. Not because Sally Potter’s staging is particularly funny or moving – it is neither, as a good Carmen can and should be – but because it looks like the latest page of the current administration’s drawn-out suicide note to the Arts Council.

When John Berry became ENO’s artistic director, refreshing the repertoire of bread-and-butter pieces that keep opera troupes in business was a priority. And what has he delivered? After barely revivable new productions of Verdi’s La traviata and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, we now have Potter’s dramatically inert, visually uninspired Carmen, which already looked ripe for the landfill site on opening night.

This Carmen is a first foray into opera for Potter, a film director, and her inability to come to terms with the medium’s requirements – and lack of belief in it – are evident from the outset, when she projects footage of the Coliseum foyer, the street outside and the alley at the side of the theatre, as if from CCTV cameras. If her intention is to mount a searing indictment of the surveillance state, Bizet’s opera is a strange vehicle with which to do it. In any case, she doesn’t follow her idea beyond the opening scene, and never clarifies how or why the action ends up in Spain, using the back of her prison-wall set from Act I to suggest the bull-ring arena of Act IV.

Even more damaging is her jettisoning of the linking spoken dialogue – making nonsense of the narrative and rendering the motives of the character Micaëla inexplicable – in favour of a new sung English version by Chris-topher Cowell, which amounts to a rewrite, at best a paraphrase and at worst a falsification, of Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto. The chorus of street urchins is transformed into a procession of youthful God-botherers got up in adult wedding gear, presumably because Potter has replaced the military guard with a security firm, of which Don José, in a suit, appears to be a middle manager.

The excerpts from Potter’s blog, on ENO’s Carmen-designated website, reveal that she has dreamt of bringing opera, “so often steeped in history and nostalgia, crackling into the present”. The combination of arrogance and ignorance combined in this observation takes the breath away, as does her desire to remove the “Spanish clichés” of traditional productions.

For the past 25 years in the UK, opera and theatre directors have been doing just that, most notably at ENO during its “powerhouse” period, when David Pountney devised his low-budget, rough-edged South American Carmen on a car dump. Set in the 1940s, it had raw passion and energy, qualities notably missing from this anodyne updating.

Potter’s failure to animate the drama and characters is signalled by the prominence of dancers – hip-hop for the street scenes, tango-inspired routines for the entractes – who serve as the flimsiest of fig leaves to cover up her inability to get little more than concert performances from her soloists and chorus. (For her Act III aria, Katie Van Kooten’s rich-voiced Micaëla simply walks on and sings before walking off, while the chorus look for most of the evening like extras hanging around doing nothing in particular during a break in a film shoot.)

The tragedy of this Carmen – in generic, unspecific sets by Es Devlin and unflattering contemporary costumes by Catherine Zuber – is that ENO fields what could have been a fine cast given help by a director with an understanding of the opera’s central theme, the destructive power of blind passion. Alice Coote’s lyrical, well-sung Carmen, short on sexual allure, meets her fate with a zombie-like passiveness and doesn’t begin to suggest the anarchic free spirit of one of opera’s most fascinating heroines. Van Kooten’s Micaëla, vocally strong until nerves undermined her aria, and David Kempster’s toreador are both ciphers in this staging, and it is left to Julian Gavin’s José to inject some electricity into the final scene. The small parts are decently taken, and the most consolatory aspects of the first night were the authority of ENO’s dynamic, youthful music director, Edward Gardner, and the high level of the orchestral playing. But the production is a write-off.

In Cardiff, Welsh National Opera’s production of Rossini’s La cenerentola fares little better. A legacy of the recently departed general director Anthony Freud,it is a co-production with Houston Grand Opera, Barcelona’s Teatre Liceu and Geneva’s Grand Théâ-tre, staged by the Spanish team of Joan Font (director) Joan Guillen (designer) and Xevi Dorca (choreo-grapher), from the Catalan theatre company Comediants. Where Peter Hall, at Glyndebourne, treated Rossini’s almost semi-seria as a dark social drama with a happy end, Font and co transform it into a downmarket fairy-tale panto that turns out to be Cinderella’s dream (or possibly nightmare), with hideously garish costumes, hoary commedia dell’arte routines and a team of “rats” who double as Cinderella’s friends and sceneshifters.

Stylishly but a bit staidly conducted by Carlo Rizzi, it is partly redeemed by the lovely singing of the Italian mezzo Marianna Pizzolato in the title role – the nearest thing I have heard in the theatre to the great recorded Cenerentolas, Teresa Berganza or Giulietta Simionato – and the fearless and elegant Don Ramiro of the South African tenor Colin Lee, who could give Juan Diego Florez a run for his money in this repertoire. Both are immeasurably superior to their Glyndebourne counterparts last summer, and make the feebly humourless stage antics just about tolerable. Like ENO, WNO needs to think long and hard about its choices of production teams.

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