The Tsarina’s Slippers, Royal Opera House, London

Have you ever wondered what lies inside those gift-wrapped boxes that adorn department store windows in the run-up to Christmas? Their purpose is to entice consumers through the door but they work on the Russian doll principle. You unwrap layer after layer until you find there is nothing inside.

The Royal Opera’s Christmas box – a staging of a little-known Tchaikovsky comedy – operates on the same principle. Designed to lure you into the theatre, it is decorated with fairytale Russian motifs, fake snow and a faux-naïf man in the moon. The costumes are a picture of old-fashioned folksiness, the dancers a tourist show of bog-standard Cossacks, ballerinas and dancing bears. Take away the wrapping, and what do you find? A performance with not a single original idea.

In the run-up to Friday’s opening night, there was much sales talk about this opera’s unwarranted neglect. The Tsarina’s Slippers, we were told, had had to contend with a stereotype of Tchaikovsky as a tragic loner, more at home with love and death than with Gogol’s anarchic fantasy. Far from deserving neglect, The Tsarina’s Slippers had “as much comic variety as dramatic depth”.

These claims are not substantiated by Francesca Zambello’s staging, which is as funny as a Christmas cracker joke and as deep as a squashed mince pie. Zambello first directed The Tsarina’s Slippers at Wexford in 1993 – during Elaine Padmore’s tenure there, and under its Russian title, Cherevichki (correct translation: boots, not slippers). Its success kindled their joint ambition to restage it in a larger theatre. Fast-forward 16 years: Padmore is Covent Garden’s director of opera, Zambello the Harold Prince de nos jours. Reheating old triumphs sometimes works but the opera itself has to be a sure-fire hit, which The Tsarina’s Slippers is not.

Removed from Wexford’s telling simplicities, Tchaikovsky’s comedy emerges as a big-budget number, sprinkled with cutesy child performers and sterilised by picture-book designs (Mikhail Mokrov and Tatiana Noginova). If the intention was to create something for the family, why sing it in Russian? If, on the other hand, you are trying to ape the Bolshoi, why not import the Bolshoi? But then there would be no opportunity to involve the Royal Ballet in another mutually distasteful collaboration between Covent Garden’s two resident companies. Alastair Marriott’s choreography, a cheap copy of Petersburg tradition, is just a part of the commercial wrapping.

The conductor, Alexander Polianichko, does what he can with a score that never settles or strikes fire, except when Vakula, the tenor hero (Vsevolod Grivnov, impressive – pictured above), indulges in the melancholy lyricism in which Tchaikovsky always excelled. Larissa Diadkova and Maxim Mikhailov lead a merry dance as Witch and Devil (also pictured), and it is good to welcome back Vladimir Matorin (Chub) and Sergei Leiferkus (His Highness), the latter now stretched at the top. Only Olga Guryakova’s strident Oxana disappoints. Do not be surprised if this show goes the way of the best Yuletide tinsel – into the bin.

Until December 8, tel +44 020 7304 4000. www.roh.org.uk