Odysseus Unwound, Alexandra Palace, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

On paper it sounded promising, if a trifle ambitious. Having heard about the renaissance in Shetland knitting, director Bill Bankes-Jones ventured north into a world of sheep, cliffs, rocks, sea, textiles and island-hopping - "the raw materials of the Odyssey". Meanwhile, composer Julian Grant saw a knitting pattern that evoked in his mind "an aural correlation by contour and density" and realised he could mirror the laws of making lace in his music. Together they would spin a new yarn; by putting Shetland lace-makers on stage beside singers and players, they would knit the Odyssey in song.

Meanwhile, news intruded, of a bunch of American marines who had butchered some Iraqi civilians. This chimed with Grant's take on Odysseus: "a smooth and suave psychopath, whose tales of his own adventures conjure up a nightmare of blood-letting". This show had everything going for it; the Arts Council, plus a flurry of other funding bodies, agreed to chip in.

The result, played out amid the crumbling Pompeian frescoes of the Alexandra Palace Theatre, was not so neat. We were plunged in medias res, with Hecuba, Odysseus, the female chorus and the orchestra all going fortissimo, while six Shetland women knitted and perled: since the words were only intermittently distinguishable, one wondered what they were all so het up about. The programme promised all the elements of Odysseus's journey - the shipwrecks, the Sirens, the six-headed Scylla - but we never got a handle on anything.

The skilfully orchestrated music, with its Stravinskian and Brittenesque echoes, was beautifully played by a small ensemble and the vocal lines were richly worked; but the audience needed to be acclimatised, and this Grant disdained to allow. Baritone Daniel Broad's luminous timbre and heroic appearance went for nothing, as we vainly struggled to interpret his clumsily stylised antics. When he finally expired, pinioned in a forest of threads we had watched being woven throughout the evening, it was to general relief. Not a stitch had been dropped by any of the performers; that, alas, was the director's prerogative.