Don Giovanni, Opera Up Close, Soho Theatre

When you go to a trendy London performance "space" to watch an opera about rape and murder you should probably expect a few shocks. Or, if this ain’t your first Don Giovanni, you should expect not to be surprised by whatever provocations the director may have in store – which is much the same. What you probably don’t expect is for the overture to be played electronically and/or sound like it’s been remixed by Thom Yorke. But in Robin Norton-Hale’s "new version", that’s what you get – and plenty more besides. And you know what? It really works. It does. Mostly.

Norton-Hale’s Don – or in full: Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a new version by Robin Norton-Hale – is a thorough re-wiring of the Mozart/Da Ponte original. Johnny Sterling (for 'tis now his name) is a trader in the city, with an insatiable appetite for women and… wait for it… no morals. His servant (sorry: "intern"), Alexander, is a luckless stooge, fearful of being jailed for his boss’s crimes. The character formerly known as the Commendatore is a retired barrister, Zerlina is a post-grad backpacker, and so on.

It’s all part of the fun, of course, that when you see a classic story "reimagined by..." you don’t know where the original will end and the adaptation begin (Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: compare and contrast). Realistically, though, once you remove Da Ponte’s libretto and characterisation, and, um, substantial chunks of Mozart’s music, one might argue that the result is not so much Mozart’s Don Giovanni as Robin Norton-Hale’s Johnny. But we’ll come back to that.

Both the music – more or less Mozartian – and the direction were clever, cannily inventive (especially, in the case of the design, where limited stage space was concerned) and punctuated by some very deft touches. Harry Blake’s injections of live electronica – traces of dubstep, R&B and minimalism as well as sound effects – contributed not only to the Noughties wine-bar flavour of the piece but also to the opera’s precarious humour. Pianist/music director Emily Leather – also live and on stage – worked like a Trojan to corrall Mozart’s score with (max) two hands, oftentimes also conducting the singers.

Don Giovanni is a smart choice for a small company, but the sum of the parts was a little light, even in this small venue. Hell, for example, needs its legions, and Mozart envisioned a damnation scene so frightful that it called for the use of trombones. Johnny here was hounded to the bad place by three petite young ladies and a girl on the piano. It weren’t quite the same.

Also a little light, unfortunately, were the voices. The proof of the operatic pudding is (duh…) in the singing, and there were, as Miss August averred, "no goosebumps". Talented graduates all, some evidently on their way to bigger things – keep an eye out for Maciek O’Shea (Johnny) and Richard Immerglück (Alexander) – they were in no sense inaudible or weak, just young and not very full. There was clarity in spades, but not much clout. The second-half show-stopper arias did all get the requisite applause, but it felt like we were going through the motions.

The acting, also, was shy. I know, I know, these poor singers can’t catch a break. But you know it when you see it, and somehow the translation to modernity left even less room for "opera acting" than usual: those who scuffed about the stage in a "we’re-too-young-and-cool-to-be-here" sort of way actually carried it off rather better.

Joanna Marie Skillet brought a moment of genuine pathos to Elvira’s mourning, and Immerglück was, throughout, exceptional. But O’Shea had succumbed to a kind of cod-Lothario shtick, which chimed all too well with his vaudeville-roué facial antics (seemingly modelled on Lord Farquaad from Shrek), but didn’t honestly mesh with the idea that he was a murderous rapist. Robin Bailey’s Octavius had a tendency to drift about ineffectually mid-stage that seemed beyond irony – though, in fairness, Octavius/Ottavio is famously a minger of an acting job, on account of his being a complete douche. 

The "translation" to English had its own predictable pros and cons. The catalogue-of-conquests aria – "Here in London, one thousand and three!" – was much funnier for the statistics being readily comprehensible, and there were some neat rhymes ("feelings"/"dealings", "thrilling"/"not willing") and gleefully cheap gags about Third World debt and gap students. But there seemed no good reason why the men’s names should be translated, yet not the girls’; or why Leporello (in your old money) should become "Alexander", apart from that it’s a preppy, City-boy type of name and happens to scan. A lot of the rest of it didn’t, though. "Res-tor-aunt", for example: ironical City-boy twattishness, or just bad word-setting? (NB It’s no one’s fault that repetitions always sound sillier in one’s mother tongue; but "I’ll check the kitchen!" isn’t a classic line in any language.)

Still, faced with the eternal dilemma of working either in the spirit or to the letter, the Norton-Hale translation goes straight for the spirit – and hits its mark. For all its laughs, proper and improper, Don Giovanni is a nasty story: it has to be, or the moral resolution is rendered null. It used to be that there was a cheery finale where the surviving characters came together to hammer the point home, like the end of an episode of Thundercats. It’s usually omitted now, and fair enough - nobody goes to the opera house for an ethics lecture. But Norton-Hale has done a pretty good job of reminding us how the audience was supposed to feel when confronted by Mozart’s original.

It was interesting to watch the punters negotiate this freshened-up moral reality. The English libretto leaves little room for ambivalence – the word "rape" features starkly several times – and the action even less; but at the curtain there were still plenty of chuckles over Johnny’s naughty behaviour. Oh, and the lady in front found it terribly funny that he was a banker. Still, you can’t win 'em all, I suppose.

• Opera Up Close's Don Giovanni continues at the Soho Theatre until 17 September