Welsh National Opera's 1996 Don Giovanni was Katie Mitchell's very first opera staging. Now, with its revival alongside her recent Jephtha, and in the same season as her Jenufa, one can't help feeling she would have approached it slightly differently today, since the characterisations seem less instinctively rooted in the drama of music.

In the pit, Tugan Sokhiev goes for the dark undercurrents that run through so much of Mozart's score - but, in doing so, risks obscuring the precise and idiomatic details that are the hallmark of a Mozartean.

While revival director Elaine Kidd reasserts the serious vein, the laughs still come thanks to pointed surtitles and Neal Davies's sharply defined Leperello. But the fact that the element of physical brutality is strong, and that Garry Magee's ignoble Don is not musically seductive, means that there can be little sympathy with this pair.

However, the sense of a strongly feminist vendetta against a serial rapist is dissipated by a trio of women whose acting is not solid enough. Geraldine McGreevy's Donna Anna and Nathalie Christie's Zerlina scratch the surface; only the Donna Elvira of Catrin Wyn-Davies is deeply felt.

This is an opera notoriously full of ambiguity, but when the Don is dragged down to hell, it is never quite clear whether he is paying the penalty for rape and pillage, whether his downfall was in resorting to murder or indeed whether the murdered Commendatore comes from the grave to wreak vengeance not just for the attack on his daughter but on behalf of all the Don's victims.

Central to Mitchell's interpretation, though, is that the Commendatore's appearance represents divine intervention. To underline the point, Fra Angelico's Christ in Majesty is translated into three dimensions to become the Commendatore's memorial statue. As the statue comes alive, Christopher Purves's chilling presence certainly makes the death scene work. But when the women set light to the book in which the Don's conquests have been recorded for a symbolically expiating conflagration, nothing actually caught fire.

And, for all its good points, the same was ultimately true of this performance.

· Ends tonight. Box office: 029-2087 8889.