Remember Edward Albee’s play The Goat? The one where a slick architect falls head-over-heels in love with a dumb beast? Well, imagine that it was an opera. And that the architect was a film director. And that instead of an animal the object of his affection was a fetching pink stool. “Can I sit on you?” warbled Pierre-Etienne Bergeron’s lovesick Truman, prompting Chair (Charlotte Ellett, soprano) to reply, “You don’t beat about the bush, do you?”

This is the Welsh composer John Metcalf’s helter-skelter A Chair in Love, which received its English premiere at the Buxton Festival on Wednesday to a generous but rather non-plussed audience response. Which really mirrored my own reactions: Metcalf’s work is sometimes touching and always eager to please, but it’s writing emotional cheques that it just can’t cash.

In fact, that’s probably more the fault of Metcalf’s Canadian accomplices – his librettist, the playwright Larry Tremblay, and director Keith Turnbull. They both talk a good talk in the programme: for example, the circumstances of the opera’s gestation in 2003 (just as the Canadian Parliament was debating same-sex marriage), and whether there is a such a thing as a “sexual equilibrium between a person, an object and an animal”. (Truman’s dog, the bow-wowing bass Michael Douglas Jones, is also in on the action, pining for his owner and forced to visit a “Dogtor” to work out his issues). More recently there has been coverage of real-life “objectum-sexuals”, including the woman who went as far as “marrying” her phallic soul-mate the Eiffel Tower.

This flighty score and dense script can’t really bite into these issues. Metcalf’s puckish music, written for peripatetic wind quintet (the virtuosic Pentaèdre), cheeps and chatters beguilingly enough, but it is too soft-focus to draw out the allegorical angst.

In turn, the librettist’s Big Idea – whether Truman’s love, aesthetic and idealised like his work, is more or less valid than his dog’s earthy affection – too often dissolves in the plot tangles. But A Chair in Love is probably most hindered by its small-scale origins in the workshop: Turnbull’s staging is limp and sluggish, and even in Buxton’s tiny theatre the players often looked stranded. A diligent cast and scintillating players deserved better. One more performance, on Sunday: at least a visit to Ikea will never seem the same again.

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