In opera today, new productions, as often as not, mean shared productions. The budgetary benefits are obvious, particularly for non-cash-cow works outside the standard repertoire, but there is always a danger that the company that doesn’t initiate the staging will get reheated seconds, or, in the case of the Royal Opera’s “new” The Rake’s Progress, fried-up fourths.

Fourteen months ago, I attended the first run of Robert Lepage’s production at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, in Brussels. Since then, it has travelled to the Opéra de Lyon and San Francisco. With the Teatro Real, in Madrid, yet to come, it turned up at Covent Garden looking travel-weary: undercast, revived without much dedication or insight from the director - Lepage and his video artist, Boris Firquet, arrived in London, according to a remarkably frank diary in the programme book, only a fortnight before Monday’s opening night, leaving the rest of the rehearsals to assistants - and conducted with a leaden hand by Thomas Adès, who fatally robs Stravinsky’s ingenious pastiche of its brilliance and piquancy.

As with ENO’s recent “new” Candide - first seen in Paris and subsequently Milan - what we get in London is essentially a rehash, albeit with mostly new personnel.

Carl Fillion’s 1940s/1950s Hollywood-inspired sets, so fresh and imaginative in Brussels, seem lost on the larger Covent Garden stage, though his settings - a scene from the Midwest, with an oil pump at work in an expanse of agricultural land for the bucolic idyll of Act I, a Californian piazza with pool for Rakewell’s London home, a run-down, neon-lit gaming house for the descent to hell of Tom’s would-be nemesis, Nick Shadow, in the “graveyard” - look splendid as static tableaux. The modernising dislocation in London seems cosmetic, especially compared to Olivia Fuchs’s hard-edged contemporary allegory of ambition and greed, as seen recently at Garsington.

Unlike Fuchs, Lepage fails to make memorable characters of his new principals, most of whom sound underpowered thanks to the nonreflecting openness of Fillion’s scenery. The exception, vocally at least, is John Relyea’s darkly sung Shadow: he gets his words across trenchantly, but lacks the sardonic charisma of the production’s original diabolique, William Shimell, and of Christopher Purves’s riveting portrayal at Garsington.

Part of the problem is the size of the Royal Opera House.

Stravinsky conceived his big opera on a relatively intimate scale. It was first staged at Venice’s jewel-like La Fenice and, soon after the premiere, found congenial British homes at Glyndebourne and Sadler’s Wells. Covent Garden’s first production, directed by Elijah Moshinsky and conducted by Colin Davis, solved the problems of a big-house Rake’s Progress, but they were working with big-house stars: Robert Tear’s rather than Charles Castronovo’s pallid Tom, Helen Donath’s (later Felicity Lott’s) Anne rather than Sally Matthews’s toothsome but bland impersonation.

Even Patricia Bardon’s voluptuous bearded lady, Baba the Turk, sounds small-scale, although she is amusing enough in the crockery-hurling scene. Lepage’s gag of silencing her chatter by having Tom throw her into the pool is less funny this time round - she has to be given the kiss of life by a hunky lifeguard - and the misplacing of the break before scene three of Act II ruins Auden and Kallman’s inspired gagging of the garrulous Baba during the interval.

The real coup de grâce is delivered by Adès’s lifeless conducting. With his head buried in the score, he gets some beautiful playing from the solo winds of the orchestra, but, despite Lepage, Firquet and Fillion’s cinematic transformations - including a car race through streets of London - the tension sags, his tempi getting more ponderous as the evening drags drearily into a lethargic final act. This Rake’s progress seems interminable: by the end, I had ceased to care.

It would be unfair to use Opera Holland Parkas a stick to beat the Royal Opera with. Standards at the alfresco West Kensington tent are never going to be world-beating. Even by its own lights, the artistic results range widely, from worse than Marx Brothers’ Fright at the Opera dire (an opening Il Trovatore redeemed only by the musical, if hardly fire-snorting, Azucena of Anne Mason) to not far short of sensationally good (an invigoratingly fresh, frisson-filled Tosca, which finishes, alas, today).

An English-language Magic Flute, directed by Simon Callow, looked intriguing on paper. You can see the thinking behind OHP’s choice: a man who has played both Mozart in the stage premiere of Amadeus and his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, in the film could surely not go wrong. But you wouldn’t ask an actor who had played Robert Oppenheimer to make an atom bomb, would you? The show is competent, short on magic and fairly poorly sung. Painterly sets by Tom Phillips, a stylish Tamino (Andrew Staples) and smashing trios of Ladies and Boys do not a magical Flute make, although there was enough to enjoy in the supermusical playing Jane Glover coaxed from the City of London Sin-fonia in the “pit”. And, for once, the extraneous bird noises – and distant thunder - added to the OHP experience.

So, too, did distant police sirens in Stephen Barlow’s clever updating of Tosca to the “political” year of 1968. The programme said we were in Rome, but Yannis Thavoris’s single set evoked a small-town Sicilian piazza, lorded over by the local mafia capo, Scarpia, who attempts to seduce his diva and tortures her lover in full view of his constituents. It shouldn’t work, but it does, thanks to Barlow’s unerring stage-craft - only the nonflagration of Tosca’s suicide misses the mark -/and compelling performers as Scarpia and Tosca.

Nicholas Garrett acts the sharp-suited, thuggish politico memorably, while Amanda Echalaz sings a Floria in the Callas mould, flashing her tigress temperament and thrilling high Cs with the same precision and venom deployed when she digs the spikes of her tiara into her tormentor’s throat. With a bit more legato phrasing - and fewer breaths - in her aria, and darker chest notes, the South African soprano could be the Tosca we have all been waiting for.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010