Famously based on Alexandre Dumas’ play about a real-life love story, La Dame aux Camélias, Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, meaning ‘the fallen woman’, tells the story of the doomed love between a high-class, consumptive courtesan Violetta and her lover Alfredo. This scandalous subject matter was certainly a matter of some debate when it was first performed in Venice in 1853, but today it is one of the most celebrated and often performed operas in the Italian repertoire, due to its strong story, brilliant score and beautiful heart-aching music.

Susan Ellis, Lorina Gore and Kang Wang © Jade Ferguson @visualpoetsociety

This new co-production between Opera Queensland, State Opera South Australia and West Australian Opera adopts a new slant on the tragic operatic heroine. Here Violetta is represented not only as a fun-loving party girl, but also as a repressed sex-worker, denied the right to step outside the narrow confines of her societal role when she falls in love with Alfredo.

Director, Sarah Giles, offers audiences a fresh twist to the story by examining this period piece through a contemporary feminist lens. Cleverly introducing this theme during the overture, Giles provides an immediate...