I'm glad I have seen Opéra de Lyon's production of Beethoven's Fidelio. It is not what you would call a conventional staging - director Gary Hill has wrapped it in a media installation and some passages from Harry Martinson's 1950s poem-cycle Aniara (itself turned into an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl) and sent it spinning into space at some indeterminate time in the future. In which case, the question is raised - why not just do Aniara?

It is set on board a prison-ship, where all is monochrome, like early episodes of Star Trek. The cast mainly use two-wheel personal transporters to move around - creating quasi-balletic movement, as they lean into bends and push off, as well as an almost rigid erect stance for balance and no gesticulation.

The prison staff - Rocco, Leonore and Jaquino - are in bulky white all-in-ones. The prisoners' striped costumes evoke the Nazi concentration camps.

A gauze for front-projection distances us from the characters. The video is stunning. At times it is in time with and reflects the music and action - in the first act quartet 'Mir ist so wunderbar', for example, or like coils and tangles of barbed wire in the dungeons. When Rocco releases the prisoners, they emerge ('O Welche Lust') to a pattern of frost flowers which slowly change to green-tinged leaf shapes - the only colour in the whole show apart from the spinning USA quarter dollar from which, occasionally, the eagle breaks free.

At other times, however, it distracts from the music and seems to bear little relation to anything, being merely attractive. Besides, the director is not above chucking in an incongruously topical reference to waterboarding or releasing classified documents, to the amusement of the audience.

The singing is good. Particularly effective is Florestan's first note - a long-held, agonised 'Gott!', which Nikolai Schukoff invests with vibrato that is almost reverberation. Perhaps a tad robust for a man who is dying of starvation, he plays the part with the intensity of a man who has acted on his beliefs. Michael Eder's Rocco is stolid, getting on with his job. His voice gives a warmth and richness to his interactions with his daughter and employees.

Valentina Nafornita is a rather pert Marzelline in black leggings and a short tunic dress completely covered in large pyramidal studs, rejecting the advances of Christian Baumgärtel's Jaquino. Her distress at the revelation of Leonore's true identity is rather ignored in this production.

Don Pizarro (Pavlo Hunka), the evil prison governor, is a mix of Kao Chiu in the 1970s Nippon TV series of The Water Margin and a baddie in NBC's 1980 series Shogun. He comes on, he sings robustly, but the sheer bulk of his costume renders him curiously immobile and detracts from his menace - he was booed, pantomime-style, at the curtain calls. Similarly, Andrew Schroeder's Don Fernando, in Shogunesque costume with origami shoulders, sings effectively as the good Minister, but without drama.

Erika Sunnegårdh is a restrained Leonore, the fervour of her love controlled. Her voice floats, as it should, over the rest of the cast in the final set piece, as Liberty breaks free of the spinning quarter.

Chorusmaster Alan Woodbridge and conductor Kazushi Ono do well to convey the power and intensity of the music. Clara Simpson speaks the narrative verses soberly, unemotionally.

Ultimately, this is a bleak version of Beethoven's opera. The prisoners are not set free. Florestan is merely released from the dungeon and no longer starved. The prison-ship still spins through space. It's Fidelio, Jim, but not as we know it.