Life in the opera house would be far duller without Janácek’s madcap Adventures of Mr Broucek. It took its composer 12 tortuous years to adapt Svatopluk Cech’s two satirical novels about a Prague landlord’s bizarre journeys. What emerged has never quite caught on: this new production by Opera North (co-produced by Scottish Opera) is the UK’s first outside London.

You’ll understand more about the piece’s problems if you hear where those adventures take its strangely unlikeable hero. One moment he is downing pilsners in his local; the next he’s been spirited away: first to a lunar colony of artists he despises, and then, reluctantly, to fight with Czech patriots in the 15th century.

These are two very contradictory journeys. On the Moon, Janácek’s score is a patchy collage of waltzes and polkas, deployed to spoof the intelligentsia that were snubbing him back on Earth. But by the time he got round to Broucek’s second jaunt, Czechoslovakia had been born. Here, all of a sudden, is the composer’s mature and inspired voice, all angular ferocity and torn lyricism.

John Fulljames’s staging does its best to bring both acts together. Broucek’s present-day world is 1968, when Prague was dreaming of freedom (the Moon, all spangly minidresses and lab coats) that was all too soon to come to an end (a 15th-century rebellion with very 20th-century grimness). The framing device is neat and intelligent, but it still feels underdone — particularly in that odd first half. It’s huge fun to see that redoubtable baritone Donald Maxwell stripped to the skimpiest of briefs and presiding over a Dadaist lunar “happening”, but much of the rest seems pretty aimless, most of all when it comes to the young lovers of the piece, uncertainly played by Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts and Anne Sophie Duprels.

Thankfully, Lloyd-Roberts, Duprels and the rest of the cast come off much better when they return in the 15th century. And, just as the music gets back on track — fired up by Martin André’s vigorous conducting — so, too, does a newly poignant drama. On this stage the Czechs win this battle; in 1968 we know how badly it ended.

Yet if it’s laughs you want, you have them with John Graham-Hall’s Basil Fawlty of a Broucek. It’s a subtly brilliant performance: disgust, scorn, cowardice, all eked out of a horribly ungrateful libretto (bluntly translated by André and Fulljames). Naturally Broucek learns nothing from his adventures — except that he has survived by doing nothing. You won’t find another opera that teaches that.

Box office: 0844 8482720, to Oct 24, then touring: operanorth.co.uk

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