First seen at Covent Garden in 1995, Jonathan Miller's modern-dress production of Cosi Fan Tutte has undergone a significant number of transformations over the years. Miller has overseen many of its revivals himself, carefully refashioning his staging to accommodate each successive cast and making subtle changes in mood and emphasis. It remains a compelling piece of music theatre, wonderful in its delineation of Mozart's mix of comedy and psychological pain. Its latest outing, however, is less overtly erotic than on previous occasions, while the note of hard-edged cynicism, never far from its surface, has become troublingly explicit.
Miller now places the emphasis, at times bitterly, on the protagonists' narcissism, while the gadgetry jokes, controversial when the production was new, have been rethought for our technology-dependent age. The characters ceaselessly examine their transformations, whether sartorial or emotional, in the full-length mirror that dominates the set, and obsessively photograph themselves and each other with their mobile phones. Later on, Mozart's four lovers use those same mobiles to video their sexual betrayals with damaging casualness. The fraudulent but lethal marriage contract, meanwhile, is now on somebody's laptop, ready to vanish into cyberspace once it has ruined lives.
The edginess that affects the staging also infiltrates the music. A harsh laughter emanates from the pit, where Colin Davis conducts the score with a mixture of gossipy scurrility and insight. Remarkable, if at times perplexing, performances from Dorothea Röschmann and Matthew Polenzani, as Fiordiligi and Ferrando, form the evening's kernel. The emotional veracity of Röschmann's singing marks her out as one of today's greatest Mozart interpreters, yet the role pushes her to the edge of her technical limits and sometimes beyond. Polenzani, popular in New York but little known here, achieves an almost tragic intensity in his depiction of Ferrando's descent from naive idealism to psychological turmoil.
Lorenzo Regazzo and Elina Garanca, as Guglielmo and Dorabella, are marginally less convincing and considerably less sympathetic. Garanca, extrovert and wilful, occasionally aspires to hog the limelight, but doesn't always succeed. Regazzo is a model of angry self-delusion, though he undermines his bluff sexiness by pulling too many self-consciously comic faces.
Their manipulators are Thomas Allen's Alfonso, pruriently elegant, as always, and Rebecca Evans's Despina - self-assured, less embittered than most and very, very funny.
· Repeat performances on Friday and Sunday. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
