"Democracy from the skies" proclaims a banner strung across the back of the set, and the revving of a car backstage isn't the usual Holland Park noise but the jeep driving Pinkerton to his new house. This is Nagasaki, the setting for the park's Madama Butterfly, and the year is 1946.

Few operas are as inextricably located in a certain place as Puccini's tearjerker, but Ian Rutherford's new production moves it on 40-odd years to the post-bomb US occupation. So the drab wartime signs in the first act give way to neon for the second as the rebuilt city creeps up to the walls of Butterfly's newly lino-floored home.

Does it work? Not entirely. It's always a bad sign when a director has to add things to a synopsis to ensure that his concept makes sense, and overall it throws up as many doubts as elucidations.

It would stand a better chance, though, if some of the central performances were more involving. Julie Unwin's Butterfly has perhaps taken her geisha training very seriously; that would account for her wooden demeanour in the first act, and the transformation from this to her second act Americanised incarnation, in which she is more engaging, is not entirely convincing. Still, her singing, which gains in presence and passion throughout, is some compensation.

The American tenor Richard Roberts captures Pinkerton's youthful, naive arrogance but sounds a bit dry - though to be fair he was masked by the noise of a downpour for much of the first act. Simon Thorpe is a sympathetic, smooth-toned Sharpless. The supporting roles shouldn't really steal the show, but they do in the form of Alasdair Elliot's expert Goro and Alison Kettlewell's moving Suzuki.

Dominic Wheeler gets a reasonably sumptuous sound from the small City of London Sinfonia in a version of the score that reopens some cuts made by the composer. Once again: interesting, but the opera as Puccini left it was a tauter show.

· Until July 15. Box office: 0845 230 9769.