Words, words, words! By the end of this performance of Walton’s The Bear, I was ready to scream it out loud. Because, while each of the three Royal Opera House Jette Parker Young Artists cast in this one-acter had the vocal goods, none managed to get across more than a quarter of their lines.

Perhaps the Royal Opera thought it was on to a clever tack with this Young Artists showcase. Walton’s opera is, after all, based on Chekhov and features the typically Chekhovian trio of an arch widow (Madame Popova), her creaky butler Luka and a sozzled landowner, Smirnov. Accordingly we had great Slavic accents from the landowner (the Lithuanian baritone Kostas Smoriginas) and the widow (the Estonian mezzo-soprano Monika-Evelin Liiv): the problem was that they were just a little too convincing.

For The Bear is, in fact, a very English exercise; half-Chekhov, half Ealing comedy. The sly whoops of Walton’s delicious orchestration conceal a nifty comedy of manners, but without the timing and wordplay the humour simply isn’t writ large enough. Vuyani Mlinde’s butler was a passable interpretation of a shuffling nonogenerian, but Thomas Guthrie’s fussy production did no one any favours, missing out most on Popova and Smirnov’s sexual chemistry: mortal foes who suddenly realise the secret to how to get over their personal frustrations. Still, at least Steven Moore and the Southbank Sinfonia found the right blend of wit and shimmer.

Meanwhile, just what are we to make of Walton’s early hit, Façade? On the plus side is the composer’s brilliant pastiche of the music hall; on the debit sheet is Edith Sitwell’s 45-minute doodle of nonsense verse, which may have had them rolling in the aisles in 1923 but now depends on us finding the fun in “Beelzebub” rhyming with “syllabub”. Narrating, Thomas Guthrie — on double duty — and Hilary Brennan were plumminess personified, but we needed a wackier set-up (or more welly from the polite baton of Dominic Grier) to hold our attention.

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