Francesca Zambello's in-the-round staging of La Bohème updates Puccini's great study of desire and social deprivation to just after the second world war. It is not an original idea: Baz Luhrmann (on Broadway) and Steven Pimlott (for English National Opera) have done much the same. But in Zambello's hands the transposition is often startlingly effective.
In place of Luhrmann's New Look flashiness and Pimlott's parade of Left Bank intelligentsia, Zambello conjures up a portrait of Paris as a metropolis where grinding poverty and the remnants of wartime austerity collide with an edgy joie de vivre and a burgeoning sexual liberalism. Shivering schoolgirls, one of them clearly consumptive like Mimi, edge nervously past gay men coupling in a railway siding. The Cafe Momus is a gloriously iniquitous den, where Schaunard cruises waiters and Musetta struts her stuff as a cabaret singer, egged on by a lesbian fan club. The police, however, patrol the streets and examine people's papers at barbed-wire checkpoints.
Peter J Davison's set consists of fragments of a vast station, a reminder that in this world everyone is in a permanent state of transit. Mimi and Rodolfo agree to separate on one of its platforms, while Marcello and Musetta hurl abuse at each other in the station cafe.
The huge scale of the production doesn't preclude intimacy, and Zambello deploys the vast space to suggest both emotional closeness and bitter alienation. This is her best production in ages: why does she seem incapable of producing work of similar stature in opera houses?
The opera is consistently well sung and acted, and there's a truly great central performance from Mary Plazas as Mimi, gloriously voiced and suggesting a woman clinging to the pleasures of life in the face of death. Peter Wedd is her passionate, emotionally confused Rodolfo, Majella Cullagh camps it up joyously as Musetta, and Grant Doyle is a handsome Marcello, less impudent, more vulnerable than most. David Parry, conducting, is more at ease with scenes of private passion than in the crowd sequences, but overall this is a powerful, haunting Bohème, well worth seeing.
· Until March 13. Box office: 020-7838 3100.
