Classical passion has a contemporary edge.

Byline: By Thomas Hall

Opera North at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle 

Eight Little Greats, Opera North's week of two-in-an-evening one-act operas is filling the Royal's stage with everything from Puccini to Kurt Weill's sardonic psychological study, The Seven Deadly Sins ( with every chance of introducing new works to experienced audiences and new audiences to opera.

First up was director Christopher Alden's take on a work even the most hardened non-opera-goer could probably name, Pagliacci. Leoncavallo's travelling players are updated to a 1980s super-group complete with spray-on leather trousers, big hair and adoring fans ( the chorus seated in rows, reflecting us the audience back to ourselves.

All good knockabout stuff. But this and Geraint Dodd and Majella Cullagh having far too much stage business to attend, distracts from fine singing ( surely the main vehicle for the tangled tragedy of a jealous husband's revenge? On the other hand, Bizet's Djamileh is Alden at his most coherent as the emotionally desensitised Haroun and his current slave-of-the-month Djamileh realise their mutually practical love arrangement has turned into the real thing.

Paul Nilon and Patricia Bardon make a well-matched pair of singer/ actors with voices superbly controlled and wholly convincing in their economy of gesture ( conductor David Parry and the orchestra raising wonderful sounds from the pit. More fine performances come from Nina Pavlovski, Jonathan Summers and Leonardo Capalbo in Puccini's Il Tabarro. Director David Pountney makes intelligent use of Johan Engels's power-ful set: a huge shipping container, its gaping void symbolizing the dark desperation of a gang of oppressed workers.

Martin AndrA's orchestra brings a surging passion to this and Manuel de Falla's La Vida Breve but might allow a little more headroom for the voices. Falla's title translates as Life is Short. It is brutal too, under Engels's harsh fluorescent lights searching both the battered interiors of the clothing factory and its inhabitants.

Alden's is a strictly adult-only staging ( Paco's (Capalbo again) frustrated response to Salud's rebuff of his advances likely to shock the less than worldly. Is, I puzzled, the transvestite machinist a reference to a certain long-running television soap opera?

Opera North until Satur-day. 0870 905 5060