Of Janacek’s six mature operas, The Excursions of Mr Broucek remains the most infrequently staged, so Opera North and Scottish Opera’s decision to team up to tour it around the north of England and Scotland is an admirable one, bringing a fascinating rarity to parts of the country that can never have seen it before. English National Opera staged the two previous British productions in living memory, and neither ventured outside London.

Mr Broucek’s neglect is understandable: it comprises a diptych of two short two-act operas, bound together by the central character of Matej Broucek — a sort of Czech Falstaff who spends too much time in the pub, drinking beer and fantasising not about seducing other men’s wives, but about space and time travel — and his acquaintances at the Vikarka Inn. They all appear as characters in his alcohol-induced dream trips to the moon and to the 15th century — in the first part as flower-sniffing aesthetes horrified when he eats sausages, in the second as combatants in the Hussite rebellion against the Hapsburg emperor Sigismund.

The 15th-century excursion — Opera North bills the pairing as Broucek’s “Adventures” — is the most nationalistic of Janacek’s late operas, written in a burst of creativity in the euphoric aftermath of Jenufa’s first production in Prague in 1916, 12 years after the Brno premiere. Europe was engulfed in a war that the Czechs hoped would release them from the embrace of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After struggling with the Moon excursion for almost a decade — and jettisoning seven librettists along the way — Janacek wrote the text and music for Mr Broucek’s time-travelling exploit in less than a year, and it contains his most rousing operatic choral passages and his richest orchestration.

John Fulljames’s staging updates the action of the prologue and epilogue to Prague in 1968, the era of the American moon landing and the Soviet invasion that crushed Dubcek’s liberalising “revolution”. Mock-up footage — excellent video work by Finn Ross — shows a Neil Armstrong look-alike planting the Czech flag in the moondust, and the lunar dwellers are cosmologists and astronauts, rather than artists. The interlude images of Russian tanks on the streets of Prague initially implies a trip to more recent history than the 15th century, but, wisely perhaps, Fulljames doesn’t follow it through. In the staging’s — and opera’s —most amusing episode, Broucek is forced to take off his strange (1968) clothes and wear “normal” attire: a red and yellow cross-hatched court jester’s outfit.

Fulljames can’t disguise the opera’s fitful humour, nor can the conductor, Martin André, gloss over the score’s occasional longueur, but they make the strongest possible case for Broucek’s revival. In Alex Lowde’s spare but evocative sets and costumes, and Lucy Carter’s atmospheric lighting, it’s a good-looking show, unmissable for John Graham-Hall’s brilliant assum­ption of the title role and a fine cast, from which Anne-Sophie Duprels and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts stand out in Janacek’s wondrously youthful love music, with fine character support from the Opera North stalwarts Donald Maxwell, Jonathan Best and Frances McCafferty.

I am still puzzling how Rupert Goold’s Turandot, set in a Chinese restaurant, got past the drawing-board stage, and who among English National Opera’s management thought it might be a concept with wings. We should be grateful that he didn’t offer Madam Butterfly in a sushi bar, or Tristan in a Cornish-pasty bakery, to ENO’s suggestible artistic director, John Berry, but this is the latest in a rapidly lengthening list of flops visited on the ENO audience as part of Berry’s policy to entrust big, popular operas to neophyte directors. Goold may be the hottest new director in the West End, with his staging of Enron garnering universal plaudits at the Royal Court, his energetic rehash of Sam Mendes’s Oliver! packing them in at Drury Lane, and tren-chant modern-dress stagings of Macbeth and The Tempest behind him, but he flounders in Puccini’s problematic psychological thriller.

Goold’s Turandot is a superficial, cosmetic makeover, controversially — he hopes — peopled by Elvis lookalikes, goths and new romantics, Chelsea pensioners, Lady Gaga dancing girls and, heaven help us, a nun. We could be anywhere in postmodern-ironic opera land: yet another vacuous “opera-as fancy-dress party” staging, in which Puccini’s fantasy-melodrama is put on as a sort of charade, with an omnipresent writer taking notes and occasionally taking part in the action. He gets his comeuppance just before the final duet — set in the kitchen, with headless male cadavers hanging up like Chinese crispy ducks, awaiting pancakes and plum sauce — as the Ice Princess slakes her blood thirst by slashing him open with a samurai sword. Would that she had done it in her silent Act I appearance, but unfortunately she is wheeled on as an ice sculpture (geddit?).

Goold’s “phantom writer” shtick screams disbelief in Puccini’s opera, as does his inability to get psychologically nuanced performances from most of his principals. With the possible exception of Amanda Echalaz’s neurotic but gloriously sung Liu, who makes her entrance after what looks like a rough night to smoke a nerve-settling fag, Goold directs around the leads: Gwyn Hughes Jones’s ringingly sung Calaf and James Creswell’s sonorous Timur are stand-and-deliver ciph-ers. Where Kirsten Blanck’s Turandot — a horror-masked, Alexander McQueen-clad Miss Havisham type — fits into the Chinese-restaurant scenario, presumably Goold’s dumb writer only knows. At least Blanck’s fearless, lyrical singing gives Puccini full measure, as do Echalaz, the thrilling chorus and the orchestra, under Edward Gardner’s measured but dramatic and temperamental music direction. For the musical performance, Goold’s Turandot is worth catching once, but, like so many of ENO’s recent efforts in core repertoire — the Gatwick Carmen, the Dublin-potato-famine Traviata — it surely can’t be revived.

Editor's choice

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