An 18th-century opera with comic touches about the imprisonment of whites by a Turkish pasha who travels with a harem of burka-clad women is likely to subdue laughter in these over-sensitive times.

It was an issue when director James Robinson first conceived his production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, new to WNO this season but first unveiled by other companies in America.

Robinson’s characters are updated to the 1920s and are travelling back to Paris on the Orient Express, a device which makes for some cinemascopic stage pictures but is otherwise – well, just a device.

It’s a strange opera – comic-serious and with spoken dialogue – and the relationships are odd, not least the apparent ambivalence of Konstanze (Lisette Oropesa), Blonde (Claire Ormshaw) and Pedrillo (Wynne Evans) to their captivity.

Perhaps they recognise enslavement by other means.

Even the central high point – Konstanze’s outpouring of grief and her refusal to accept the blandishments of Pasha Selim (Simon Thorpe) – are slightly demeaned by Robinson’s comic effects when they should stand in stark contrast to it.

The comedy itself is well done but a bit derivative and the raging Osmin (Petros Magoulas), physically bigger than his voice, seems to have walked on from a different production, a sure sign that you mess with original characters at your peril. Robin Tritschler’s Belmonte is light but heartfelt, Oropesa’s decorative singing accurate but tentative.

The Mozartian honours go to Evans, Ormshaw and the orchestra under Rinaldo Alessandrini, varying the musical pace while designer Allen Moyer’s train chugs sedately towards its Parisian buffers.