Fidelio

I'm chatting to a very, very elderly gentleman who, it transpires, reviewed the first 'space opera', Aniara in 1959 – an opera revived once after its premiere, but quitely forgotten. It was, as this Opéra de Lyon production is, based on a epic of the same title by Swedish poet Harry Martinson. Here Martinson's sci-fi tragedy provides a wrapper for Beethoven's opera, and so the enlightenment struggle against irrational oppression takes place on a space ship, Aniara, lost in the intergalactic void. Both productions attempt to navigate Martinson's complex and, for its time, forward thinking mythology: "now we have fathomed what our spaceship is / a tiny bubble in a glass of God". And so what was the 1959 space like? "Better than this," smirks our Methuselah.

And well he might, because Beethoven in space is, frankly, ludicrous. For starters, Martinson's imagery is, by now, quite dated. Characters glide around on Segways – there's a lot of reversing out of arias. Costumes come straight out of Dr Who circa Patrick Troughton. Frequently this production evokes laughs where Beethoven's music wants us to despair at tyranny – a reference to waterboarding providing a particularly risible moment.

Moreover, the mythology seems, well, alienating. A transparent(ish) scrim placed in front of the stage onto which shapes and patterns are projected serves only to place a barrier between actors and audience, leaving them to play in a hazy half-light behind distracting visuals. In the second act they use the downstage area far more and the added light and clarity is welcome. It becomes slightly more the stuggle of real humans rather than sci-fi ciphers. The famous moment where the prisoners are let out into the open provides an isolated moment of exhiliration as the projections burst from black-and-white bleakness into glorious technicolour. But, overall, these are half-formed, half-seen characters in a fiction to which we can't relate. If Beethoven's music is to mean anything it must make us feel the real and pressing possibility of tyranny. Here it feels light years away.