Directors have of late been at pains to redefine The Bartered Bride. Once primarily seen as a piece of nationalistic whimsy, Smetana's great comedy is now widely regarded as a bitter satire on a venal society that trades in human lives. Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Glyndebourne production, first seen in 1999, presents us with perhaps the bleakest interpretation of the work we have experienced in this country to date.

Lehnhoff relocates the opera to 1950s Czechoslovakia, and prises open a world in which bourgeois codes of conduct simmer beneath a drab, communist façade and where people with ready cash are capable of causing havoc. Jenik is a flash wide boy. Kecal, the marriage broker, swivels between ingratiating charm and thuggery. Tobias Hoheisel's set is a village hall, complete with its own stage, where a folk dance troupe, in cute national dress, go through their routines like something from a safely traditional production, highlighting the dreadfulness of the transactions between the protagonists down below. Jenik and Marenka's relationship, you realise, won't survive long after the final curtain, though Lehnhoff allows poor stammering Vasek to escape with his adored Esmeralda.

The revival is hampered by hard-driven, unyielding conducting from Dietfried Bernet. It's well sung and beautifully acted, though. Julian Gavin is a fantastic Jenik, at once thrilling, macho and untrustworthy, opposite Solveig Kringel born's feisty yet traumatised Marenka. Reinhard Dorn's Kecal is a model of unctuous slobbery, while Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke is a deeply moving Vasek, not so much a dolt as a naïve dreamer capable of still seeing beauty in the corrupt world round him. It's an impressive achievement, though you can't help feeling that Lehnhoff has overstated his case. For all its grimness, The Bartered Bride is still a comedy, and the evening is short on humour. Much of it is genuinely disturbing, though we don't laugh nearly as much as we might.

· In rep until August 4. Box office: 01273 813813.