The Love for Three Oranges should be a natural for DVD. The eponymous fruits are only a small part of the visual fun in a romp that also features a giant cross-dressing cook, a wind-generating little devil, magical card-games and divertissements laid on to cure a hypochondriac prince by making him laugh. Of course there can be more levels to the staging than that, depending on what a director and his/her team chooses to read into all the silliness. But if the silliness isn’t funny in the first place, then it’s hard to see why anyone should care.

Both the new Netherlands Opera production and its Lyon rival look stylish enough, though Laurent Pelly more wisely sticks to timeless pantomime rather than attempting Louis Erlo’s half-baked update. The trouble is that neither has a clue about how to make singers move. The opera is almost entirely about sight-gags and pratfalls, be it those divertissements (which lose all their point when they leave the audience as unamused as the poor prince) or Fata Morgana inadvertently displaying her knickers (which prompts his cure and her curse that he must now wander in infatuated search for the Three Oranges). Botch these moments, as both productions do, and there is not much point in carrying on.

The Dutch production stands to gain immensely from being set in the opera house, where most audiences are prepared to laugh at anything, rather than filmed in cold blood à la Lyon. That it does not so capitalise is entirely due to its tired, clichéd approach to the physical comedy (though anyone who has never seen singers running down a theatre aisle or interacting with the conductor may yet be in stitches). This leaves the best efforts of a high-class cast – with Martial Defontaine’s Prince and Willard White’s Tchelio both outstanding – high and dry. Stéphane Denève and the Rotterdam Philharmonic are just shaded by Nagano and his Lyonnais for style and point. But the short story is that we are still waiting for a Love for Three Oranges on DVD that remotely does it justice.