Puccini’s first widely popular opera, Manon Lescaut, is about flight - from place and, unsuccessfully, from self.

It’s the first up in WNO’s Spring season theme of ‘Fallen Women’, an outmoded concept in these days of sexual liberation and broad-mindedness.

This doesn’t stop director Mariusz Trelinski from pursuing it in a relentlessly urban and contemporary new production for the company with what one supposes is an acknowledgement that widespread female exploitation and unseemly male desire are still with us.

The flight is represented by travel as seen from an unpredictable digital clock above the stage, the platform of an Underground station and the vivid passing of a city nightscape through windows. The depth of the WMC’s stage is well used and everyone is on the move. Natural light barely makes an appearance.

As a ‘concept’, this one comes with curiosities, laughable contradictions between action and libretto - we sort of put up with those today - and some unnecessary patronising of the audience, which is also assailed by strobe lighting. In short, a simple story is often struggling to be told.

Musically the production is amply shaped by conductor Lothar Koenigs, and the lusty singing of Gwyn Hughes Jones as Des Grieux inspires Chiara Taigi’s Manon to almost equivalent heights. Stephen Richardson as Geronte and David Kempster as Lescaut, though having odd characterisations foisted on them, manage to break through.

For what they are worth, the smaller scenes are well done in that slightly coy manner we get when opera tries to be shocking. Monika Sawa's song and the slithering semi-clad ladies of easy virtue are the best examples in that category.

Some of the transformed set-pieces are confusing but the final idea that there are lost Manons everywhere is inspired theatre.

Is Manon no better than she ought to be? Well, if it weren't a sexist remark, the answer must be 'yes'. It's one of the problems directors have to deal with when trying to tease out the threads of a story embedded in a particular time but when prostitution, for example, has become a health as much as a moral issue. That we finally feel sorry for Manon says something about us, our ability to see through a 'concept', our enlightened view of the world, and about the transporting power of music.