Should our stock of superheroes continue their slide toward moral ambuigity and tortured self-awareness - Batman’s latest metamorphosis into The Dark Knight being the latest example - then I have a solution. Meet the hero of Damon Albarn’s pop opera, Monkey, a swarthy chimp with no sense of fair play, a massive ego and way too much hair gel. Yes, in Chinese myth Cristiano Ronaldo gets a starring role.

"It will do a terrific job of bringing in people who wouldn’t normally come here,” the Royal Opera House said when they controversially scheduled the work’s London premiere into their summer season, the first time that Monkey has been performed in the UK since its premiere at last year’s Manchester International Festival. Well, they can certainly consider that goal ticked off. At the first night, the Covent Garden foyer heaved with crowds who hadn't the faintest idea where they were going.

Perhaps it’s a moot point that Monkey isn’t really an opera. It’s much more a live action homage to the cartoon world of Gorillaz, the virtual band Albarn created with the graphic designer Jamie Hewlett, whose stunning costumes and animations give Monkey its best reason for existence.

But if Gorillaz provided short, sharp shots of searing pop, the challenge here is much stiffer. For one thing, the Chinese fable refashioned by director and writer Chen Shi-Zheng doesn’t offer much of an emotional payoff to justify a two-hour span. The terminally indolent Monkey hatches from an egg. Given a 500-year Asbo by Buddha, he is pardoned only in order to accompany an anonymous monk and two barely-explained misfits to India to achieve enlightenment.

I’m not asking for an Asian War and Peace, but the overriding principle in Monkey is the quick thrill. And the best news about Albarn’s score is how lightly it achieves that. There are no pretensions to that awful relic of the 1970s, the Rock Opera: instead we get zany riffs, fairground trippiness, rippling pentatonic anthems and even the odd blast of percussive drum’n’bass.

Yet watching the show can feel like one superlong episode of China’s Got Talent. There are contortionists, acrobats, martial artists and plate-spinners, in an impressively versatile but ultimately rather aimless display of circus skills. The rambling structure of the show is oddly stop-start, not helped by Albarn’s inability to bring any of his scenes to a proper coda. And the climax is a huge let-down, lacking the the musical and theatrical lift-off we need to take the story and its characters to heart.

All of which may be irrelevant if you were one of the cheering fans that whooped and hollered as Albarn, Hewlett and Chen took their the curtain calls. Monkey is confident, chirpy good fun - and, unlike Ronaldo, probably here to stay.

Box office: 020-7304 4000

Editor's choice

• Vote for the Breakthrough Award winner
• David Tennant back as Hamlet after back surgery
• Matt Smith is the new Dr Who