As we take out seats, the stage is a verdant idyll featuring a steep, grassy knoll, with a bamboo grove at the top and a harbour lapping at its shores. But already there is an ominous feeling in the air.

Large signs say “Lost Paradise” and before the music has even begun, surveyors appear and start to mark out the land.

Diego Torre, Michael Honeyman, Karah Son and Bronwyn Douglass in Madama Butterfly, Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, 2023. Photo © Keith Saunders

So begins Opera Australia’s superb Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour production of Madama Butterfly, directed by Àlex Ollé of La Fura dels Baus, which manages to be both spectacular and shocking, offering a meaningful, contemporary read on the ruthless, selfish, misogynistic behaviour of Pinkerton and the capitalist society he represents.

In Ollé’s provocative yet deeply emotional production of Puccini’s tragic 1904 opera, Pinkerton is a property developer. By the second act, the hill has been taken over by half-built apartment blocks, with Cio-Cio-San’s home surrounded by a construction site where the homeless huddle around fires.

Ollé’s production (with set design by Alfons Flores and costume design by Lluc...