This new production from director Graeme Murphy with creative associate Janet Vernon, and designers Michael Scott-Mitchell (production), Jennifer Irwin (costume), Damien Cooper (lighting) and Sean Nieuwenhuis (video) also takes place on a central platform.

This one, however, is built on threatening blades tended by robotic androids and suggests a cage more than a sanctuary. One of the production’s dominant images is presented before we hear a note of Puccini’s score – deep red bondage ropes in butterfly shape in which the dancer doppelganger (Teagan Lowe) of Cio-Cio-San (aka Madama Butterfly) is suspended Christ-like above the stage before being propositioned and sold off.

Murphy has replaced inner spiritual calm with external objectification and subjugation as the dominant motif that pervades both moments of love and despair. Video projections reinforce or counterpoint this with sympathetic textural monochrome relieved at crucial moments by garish dissonant colour.

Karah Son sings Cio-Cio-San with a pure sound of rounded beauty, which is, by turn, caressing and thrilling, achieving searing power in climactic notes with never a hint of stridency. With red rope girding her black plastic wedding clothes, which she sheds for white, she portrays a Cio-Cio-San motivated by playful, naive and ultimately tragic opportunism, rather than insipid innocence.

Andeka Gorrotxategi as Pinkerton has smooth tenor sound of nutty grain and complexity and a dramatic persona of self-obsessed entitlement without, it must be said, much redeeming charm. Michael Honeyman portrayed the compassionate side of colonialism as the Consul Sharpless with a voice of lyrical warmth, weight and gravitas.

As Suzuki, Sian Sharp was far from meek obeisance, flashing haughty disdain when patronized and singing with quietly glowing control, and hints of darkness. Puccini euphemistically describes Goro as a ‘marriage broker’ but in this production he is a sinister manipulative pimp who Virgilio Marino portrays with oleaginous obsequiousness.

As, respectively, the uncle who casts Butterfly out and the lover who would draw her in, Gennadi Dubinsky (Bonze) and Christopher Hillier (Yamadori) created supporting roles of coloured vigour. Jane Ede, as Kate Pinkerton, is practical and pragmatic as well as demure of voice.

Conductor Massimo Zanetti and the Opera Australia Orchestra provided expansive support, particularly to Son, in sustaining and drawing out the work’s big dramatic moments. In the wedding entrance of Cio-Cio-San and in the ‘humming chorus’, the Opera Australia Chorus inhabit a revolving stage below the platform, first clad in orderly geometric lines, later as gnarled twisted trees creating a cohesive bed of sound and an evocative texture of images.

One is left not with consoling sorrow but a sense of unease that, as world leaders debate migration, militarism and mercantilism in Osaka, seems only apt.