When we left them in January, the Trojans were besieged in 1960s America. Its royal family was born again as the Kennedy clan, its iconography was a cluttered world of transatlantic stereotypes. For the second part of Berlioz's epic the references are less specific: Richard Jones is again the director but for The Trojans at Carthage he has worked with a different designer, the more painterly John MacFarlane, though the designer of The Capture of Troy, Stewart Laing, is still credited with the costumes for the Trojans themselves.
It is much harder this time to work out where Aeneas and his raggle-taggle bunch have landed. This presentation of Dido's Carthage has a generic Mediterranean feeling, and the model neoclassical city the Carthaginians assemble to celebrate the achievements of their queen's reign in the first act is surrounded by desert. It could be North Africa, but then the lizards that cling to its vertical surfaces aren't the geckos of the Mediterranean but seem to belong to the New World; is that significant or just zoological carelessness?
It may be a trivial detail, but at least it provides something to think about. There is little else to get hold of in Jones's production, until the final curtain anyway. It is efficiently put on the stage without ever being effective or suggestive. The choreography that is so important in the second act is dreary. More fatally, the relationship between the main characters is never made interesting, and a production of The Trojans in which Dido fails to elicit sympathy and Aeneas's tug between love and duty never made palpable has to be regarded as a failure. The end is puzzling. Dido stabs herself, and as she foresees the coming power of the Roman empire, a cloth descends showing a photograph of New York swathed in the dust of 9/11; a final moral point is clearly being made, though one that is hard to decipher.
It is the kind of production that would pass unremarked were the musical standard genuinely high. That this show seemed undercast in almost every role hardly helped matters. John Daszak's desperately unprepossessing Aeneas had his moments, but not enough of them; Susan Parry's uneven Dido did the rage and despair of the third act better than the imperiousness and rapture of the first two. Clive Bayley's Narbal was gloweringly omnipresent; Christopher Saunders made something special out of Hylas's third-act aria, and Anne Marie Gibbons was a more than competent last-minute substitute in the role of Anna. The choral singing was hit and miss; the orchestral playing under Paul Daniel a bit better than that. Very little of Hugh MacDonald's English translation was audible. The answer is not surtitles but for someone to make sure the cast sings words.
· Until June 7. Box office: 020- 7632 8300.
