Olivia Fuchs's new production of Luisa Miller relocates Verdi's bleak study of class and generational conflicts to the UK in the mid-1950s. Though occasionally unwieldy, the transposition forcefully repoliticises a work deemed inflammatory at its 1849 premiere but which is now all too often presented as a purely domestic tragedy.

Verdi, however, not only inveighs against the psychological stranglehold that parents exert over children but also attacks the class prejudices that conspire to rob a younger generation of its chance of emotional fulfilment. By dramatising the temporary failure of liberalism, the opera fiercely makes a case for it, and in setting the opera in the 1950s, Fuchs turns the aristocratic Rodolfo and the proletarian Luisa into rebels with a cause, destroyed by the fact that there is as yet no social or sexual revolution into which they can escape.

Much of her staging is dominated by hunting imagery, forcefully underscoring the bitter irony that Count Walter, in trying to ensnare Luisa and her father, will inadvertently catch and kill his own son in the same trap. Sometimes, the tone falters - the lethal dose of poison is administered in a mug of tea rather than a jug of water, which strikes a false note - while Fuchs's use of ritualised, Peter Sellars-type gestures for the chorus sits uneasily with the rest of it.

The musical values are high, the only weak link being Mark Holland's occasionally imprecise Miller. Anne Sophie Duprels and Alan Oke are the lovers, both displaying the requisite combination of passion and refinement. The real surprise, however, is the Walter of Richard Angas, a singer hitherto associated with comic roles, though here creating a credible portrait of a mentally blinkered monster. A flawed but provocative evening, and vastly superior to the Royal Opera's production of Luisa Miller last year.

· In rep until August 7. Box office: 0845 230 9769.