After two hapless ventures into the world of Verdi in 2013 (his bicentenary year), Opera Australia has given us an entertaining new production of Rigoletto – one that will probably stay in the company’s repertoire for as long as its lucrative predecessor.

Elijah Moshinsky’s slick production (1991), which leaned on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, was just one of many radical updatings of Verdi’s 1851 masterpiece, which had its première in Venice. Director Roger Hodgman bucks this trend and restores the opera to sixteenth-century Mantua.

The opera opens with a short, menacing Prelude. Most directors move straight to the orgy, but Hodgman offers us a quick glimpse of an agitated Rigoletto quitting the house he shares with his secret daughter, Gilda, then a spot of cunnilingus in a laneway before we join the courtiers, who are intent on gang-raping the topless young ladies or procuring them for the inexhaustible duke of Mantua.