It must be so hard being Graham Vick. With every passing year of his self-proclaimed isolation from mainstream British opera the stakes get higher. Every new venture with his Birmingham Opera Company promises to take more risks, cross more boundaries. But, abroad, Vick remains oddly content to plough more usual furrows: he’s engaged across the world for stagings that might not be the last word in traditional but don’t come close to his West Midlands experiments.

So what happened when he combined the two approaches? The answer was this Traviata – originally conceived for the Verona arena, but now restaged in the National Indoor Arena with BOC regulars and an amateur local chorus. Perhaps this was Vick's attempt to show that a venue more used to pop fluff can host a more rewarding brand of garish entertainment, because this Traviata is a brash nightmare: its heroine a naive hedonist crushed by the mob.

When her party kicked off in Act I, Talise Trevigne’s Violetta was the Posh Spice belle of the paparazzi’s ball; by the final act, near bald and ravaged by Aids, she wandered around a lake of bouquets while some passing toffs scrawled “slut” on the wall behind her. And her great chance at love? Delusion: Mark Wilde’s feckless Alfredo is interested only in getting her into bed.

Great premise, perfect for BOC: but what a pity that it completely dissolved in the gaudy mess from Verona. A feeble amplification system often made it impossible to tell who was singing, and, early on, who our heroine actually was; the orchestra (the CBSO, efficiently steered by Massimiliano Stefanelli) remained oddly muted throughout.

Paul Brown’s gargantuan sets, dominated by a giant plastic doll, got us off to a suitably degenerate start, but the wow factor fizzled out almost immediately: the ensuing japes – drunken lurching and half-hearted pawing – just looked like old clichés swapped for modern ones. The truth is that no matter how much glitter you sprinkle on its (two) party scenes, Traviata is not an ensemble opera. Whenever the detritus was cleared away, the singers looked lost.

As for the community stars, spotlit in pens on each side of the stage, you couldn’t help but focus on the fact that they sang out of time with almost clockwork regularity; unlike in other BOC shows, they weren’t melded into the drama. And their contributions typified the musical weaknesses of the production: all its performers really belonged in one of Vick's more intimate affairs rather than in the NIA.

Distorted by the sound system, Wilde’s Alfredo seemed lightweight; Mark Holland’s coarse and blustery Germont lunged to the other extreme. And although Trevigne worked hard all night – her honeyed soprano making light work of the Act I fireworks and sweetly expiring in the finale – her vocal and theatrical skills just didn’t suit the rock-chick apparel: she never dominated those set pieces. It’s ironic, but the result of this adventure was the antithesis of the Vick doctrine: the triumph of the superficial over the dramatic.

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