One of the purposes behind Opera North's one-act opera season is to allow audiences to pick and choose their own programmes, though Bizet's Djamileh and Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins should, perhaps, be experienced together. Both are parables about the exploitation of female sexuality, and both have disquieting implications. Bizet's eponymous heroine is a harem girl determined to retain the affections of her master after her obligatory time as his sex slave has expired. Weill, meanwhile, presents us with doppelganger-ish sisters, dispatched to the cities by their parochial parents to earn the family fortune by effectively selling their bodies.

Both productions are hard hitting, though David Pountney's staging of The Seven Deadly Sins overreaches itself. It's an extreme, ferociously angry piece of music theatre that transposes the work to George Dubya's US, and aims to expose layers of institutionalised abuse in every stratum of American society. The images are hideous, though the production can't quite sustain its own unremitting level of violence. It is reasonably well performed -Rebecca Caine's hard-as- nails Anna I is in sharp contrast to Beate Vollack's traumatised Anna II - though the diction, throughout, is none too clear.

Christopher Alden's staging of Djamileh, meanwhile, relocates the opera to a modern-day loft apartment, where Patricia Bardon's Djamileh is emotionally trampled on by Paul Nilon's insidious Haroun, while Mark Stone, as his sidekick Splendiano, records their every action on film. Only gradually do we realise that Djamileh is the unwitting participant in what could either be a porn film or a snuff movie. The singing is wonderful and the nastiness of it all is heightened both by Alden's extraordinary restraint and by the fact that Bardon, Stone and Nilon are all extremely sexy. At the end you feel you've been witness to something unspeakable - a great production, unsettling and unforgettable.

· Until May 20 (box office: 0113-622 6222), then touring.