La Traviata review – Verdi's tragedy reworked for senators and courtesans

Robin Norton-Hale's production of La Traviata for Opera Up Close relocates Verdi's study of moral hypocrisy to an unnamed US city in the 1920s. Pitting a liberal young generation against a reactionary establishment, it nicely underscores the opera's restrained assault on bourgeois double standards, though it also makes a number of changes to Verdi's original scheme of things.

In keeping with Opera Up Close's determination to take opera into small theatres and studio spaces, Norton-Hale has recast Traviata as a chamber piece for five performers, reworking the narrative in the process. James Harrison's Germont, now an aspiring US senator and one of those charismatic magnate types we find in the novels of Theodore Dreiser, keeps Flora (Flora McIntosh) as his mistress, and has already encountered Louisa Tee's Violetta in the underground demi-monde world in which he secretly moves. Violetta's open cohabitation with Lawrence Olsworth-Peter's Alfredo consequently threatens to bring a whole edifice of lies and sleaze crashing down.

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Not all of it works. We could do with a greater sense of the city in which the protagonists function and move: and Alfredo's public denunciation of Violetta as a common prostitute loses its point when there are only three onlookers. But it's compelling, touching and finely performed. Singing and naturalistic acting are carefully combined. Olsworth-Peter is pushed in his upper registers, but is gauchely attractive and naive, while Harrison hectors his music a bit as he bullies Violetta. Tee is exceptional – vocally secure, and totally credible in her delineation of both Violetta's moral agony and the illness that consumes her. The piano-clarinet-cello trio that replaces Verdi's orchestra sounds good if quirky. Purists may not care for it, but it all makes for striking music theatre of considerable integrity and force.

Until 14 September. Box Office: 020-7478-0100. Venue: Soho Theatre, London