The happy Hamlet

Given the hallowed status of Hamlet, a French operatic version pandering to Parisian bourgeois taste and robbed of its tragic ending always sounded a duff prospect.

And it is true that Ambroise Thomas's 1868 opera is rich in tosh but principally of a musical variety. For most of us, the Royal Opera's new production by Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser was the first chance to encounter this rarity, a hit in its day but now scarcely performed on the British stage.

Once you get used to the bathos of hearing lines such as "Être ou ne pas être", followed by a rudely severed soliloquy, the drama rattles along briskly and is arguably more faithful to the original than, say, Verdi's Otello.

The orchestration, playing every atmospheric card in the book - celestial harps, humming choir, offstage brass and even a solo saxophone - offers clotted-cream textures and melodies as glamorous and empty as spun sugar. It is all huge fun, if Hamlet can ever properly deserve that word.

The title role is a baritone's gift and we were lucky to have, in Simon Keenlyside, a stunning exponent. His performances always have high physicality - he hurls himself around until you fear for his survival. To this he added a brooding, irresistible vulnerability. The work's other great boast is a prolonged (very) mad scene for which Natalie Dessay, a purevoiced, seraphic Ophelia, deserved her rapturous applause.

The pace slows in the gravediggers scene. They spent a good deal of time apparently smashing up Christian Fenouillat's set, with which one rather sympathised: this unwieldy, noisily revolving, nonsensically mobile depiction of Elsinore resembled nothing as much as matching chunks of hollowed-out marrow.

But the intensity of the acting and first-class singing carried the evening. Yvonne Naef 's mightyvoiced Gertrude, grotesque in a lampshade of a gown which seemed to swing all the more with each lie she uttered, was compulsively chilling. Bass Robert Lloyd made weak-willed Claudius thin enough to see through.

In the outstanding French conductor Louis Langrée, and the ROH orchestra and chorus, the work had its best possible advocates. We were just about, gratefully, to say "Goodnight sweet prince" when he suddenly became king. That's French opera for you.

Until 30 May. Box Office: 020 7304

Hamlet