English National Opera’s last Otello, 16 years ago, set it in the army barracks of a 20th-century war zone in the desert. David Alden’s new production, which also marks the 30th anniversary of his Coliseum debut, keeps Verdi’s penultimate masterpiece in the 20th century, but nudges it back 70 years earlier to between the two world wars, still somewhere in the Mediterranean, perhaps even in Cyprus. The action takes place in a single space, a battle-scarred inner courtyard in Jon Morrell’s designs to which a chair is added for the final bedchamber act.

In an interview in the programme Alden says that the production plays Otello himself as “an assimilated Muslim, who has converted to Christianity”; but in performance the effect seems to be to deracinate the opera altogether. The tragedy becomes that of an impulsive, unresolved man and his hopelessly naive young wife, who almost too easily become the victims of Iago’s smouldering, class-ridden resentment.

Neither man is really portrayed as an outsider, so Alden’s approach becomes fundamentally reductive, and leaves an emotional vacuum at the heart of the work. For all the magnificence of Stuart Skelton’s singing as Otello – for that role voices as good as his come along only once in a generation – there is little sense of personal power or charisma about this career soldier, so that his tragedy becomes that of an ordinary jealous man rather than a proud, heroic figure.

Though Skelton’s performance is musically magnificent it is never moving, and alongside a tremulous, vibrato-ridden Desdemona from Leah Crocetta, it’s hard to feel as engaged as one usually is with the narrative of this opera. Dramatically, it’s Jonathan Summers’s sardonic Iago that holds centre stage; his voice may lack an authoritative Verdian edge, but his stage persona, carrying a chip on his shoulder as big as a house, is totally compelling.

As always in an Alden production, the smaller parts are meticulous imagined – Allan Clayton’s drink-ruined Cassio, Pamela Helen Stephen’s prim, bespectacled Emilia, Peter van Hulle’s foppish Roderigo – and the chorus are carefully marshalled. Edward Gardner conducts much of the score superbly, too; just occasionally something more elemental and a bit less glitzy might have been appropriate, but it’s pretty impressive all the same.

In rep until 17 October at the London Coliseum. Box office: 020-7845 9300.