On stage is gathered giant beauty equipment: a compact, a scent spray, two lipsticks, a tube of some helpful cream – all displayed over an ascending triangle of steps disappearing almost to vanishing point in hues of tender lilac. Not that Thomas Adès’s first opera of 1995, making a rare staged reappearance in London, contains anything genuinely beautiful.

For this, remember, is the exuberant but shallow opera inspired by the late Margaret, Duchess of Argyll – Marg of Arg, as she was called when her insalubrious divorce festered through the Edinburgh law courts in 1963, bringing before the fascinated British public a life of unbridled promiscuity and extravagance.

There was more to her life than that. Her flame couldn’t have attracted the moths it did over so many years without ample magnetism, charm and wit. She had to be fun to be with.

But the librettist Philip Hensher and the composer – 24 years old when he sprang this cruel jape – look at the Duchess only to laugh, to degrade and act superior. What do we learn from this opera? Nothing on the moral front. Nor is there any powerful emotional curve to grip the audience and give them characters to hang onto: faults underlined by a production (Carlos Wagner) and design (Conor Murphy) that traps its four participants in rigid postures, aside from one extraordinary, simulated act of sex. Lots of free-flowing action there.

At least Wagner’s revival (based on his 2002 production for the De Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp) does nothing to dampen the hard, brilliant carnival of Adès’s music. The milky-voiced Joan Rodgers, as the Duchess, may have some difficulty projecting the words over the score’s bedlam, though you can’t fault her fortitude rampaging across a wide vocal register in plummy Mayfair vowels.

In compensation, Alan Ewing booms impressively as the sinister Hotel Manager; Rebecca Bottone, gathering up all the other female parts, pierces like a needle; and the pliant tenor Iain Paton (the Electrician, and sundry others) only falls down with his unidiomatic treatment in Act I of Adès’s popular song pastiche (untypically flat and overextended).

The big pleasure of this rather unfriendly night rests with the conductor Timothy Redmond and the Southbank Sinfonia, a new and dashing ensemble of recent music conservatoire graduates. Together, they plunge with exhilarating fizz, exactness and stamina into Adès’s wicked and complex web of slurred tangos, his minuscule Rosenkavalier parodies, accordion wheezes and manic hiccupping rhythms. If only all this musical invention and energy wasn’t spent on an opera and a libretto content to hammer the head of a nail.

Box office: 020-7304 4000. To June 22 2008

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