If this opera were renamed The Mostly Tolerable Flute it would be a truer description of David McVicar's five-year-old Royal Opera staging - perpetually shrouded in swirling mists and oppressed by John Macfarlane's lumbering sets, which seem to have strayed from a particularly bleak production of House of the Dead. And it would be a distinctly flattering description of Roland Böer's ponderous and unresponsive conducting, which invests Mozart's score with all the scintillating joie de vivre of a Victorian hymnbook.

No, all the Zauber in this Flöte is supplied by the cast, especially Simon Keenlyside's truly magical Papageno - which is possibly even more mesmerising now than in 2003. I doubt if there is another singer on the planet who could sustain such a Chaplinesque mixture of clowning and pathos; or pratfall round the stage with such rubber-limbed verve; or bring such wit and point to his delivery of (let us be frank) dead acres of spoken German; or sing with such vibrant tone and unforced expressivity.

Or, indeed, sweep the prodigiously upholstered figure of Kishani Jayasinghe's vivacious Papagena into his arms with such easy grace. She's one of two young sopranos who make a big impression in this show. The other is Genia Kühmeier, who seems a totally transformed singer from the erratic beginner who stumbled through La finta giardiniera here in 2006. Her Pamina will never be the last word in tonal beauty, but her sharply focused sound is now hitched to immaculate intonation and considerable lyric intelligence. She phrased her heartrending last aria with exquisite poise.

Christoph Strehl takes time to warm up as Tamino and doesn't exactly drip with charisma, but his voice is easy on the ear. So is the massive bass in the equally massive frame of Stephen Milling's Sarastro. Erika Miklósa's Queen of the Night has one of those strident vibratos that remind me slightly of dentists' drills, but she nails her stratospheric notes ably enough. And McVicar's dreary mishandling of her entrances - no lightning, no melodrama; just a lame amble from the back of the stage - hardly gives her much of a theatrical platform on which to build her character.

But that's typical of McVicar's muddy approach. One moment he seems to be going along with the opera's misogynist subtext. The rolling on of a huge, triumphal sun at the end rather suggests that he does approve of Sarastro's male hierarchy and its somewhat fascistic quest for “enlightenment”. But then he seems to undermine it by showing women muttering fearfully on the fringe of the action.

The Three Ladies and Three Boys are individually strong, but need better conducting; their ensembles are never secure and sometimes slipshod. However, I love John Graham-Hall's grotesque, angular Monostatos and his Addams Family parade of ghoulish cronies. No, they don't “black up” - which some critics regarded as a cowardly cop-out in 2003. But I can't get cross with McVicar for wanting to eliminate the nasty racist streak that Mozart allowed to creep into Zauberflöte, masterpiece or not.

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