The Québecois Robert Lepage has forged a reputation as one of the most visionary theatre directors of our age, a man with an extravagant — and unfashionable — flair for what the French call a grand spectacle : in Las Vegas, his 2005 Cirque du Soleil show, KA, is now a permanent fixture. Opera ought to be his element, but his forays into the medium have been few, especially in the UK. London has seen only his production of Lorin Maazel’s dismal 1984 at Covent Garden. Happily, the Royal Opera is making amends: a new Lepage staging of Stravinsky’s “morality”, The Rake’s Progress, is heading our way, and it promises to be a high-light of the 2007/8 season.

This 20th-century masterwork, a cornerstone of the repertoire, still carries the stigma of being a connoisseur’s piece. Lepage’s production, a five-way collaboration between the Royal Opera, San Francisco Opera, Opéra de Lyon, Madrid’s Teatro Real and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels (which unveiled it on Tuesday night) could change that. He may be a purveyor of old-fashioned spectacle, but his iconography is modern. WH Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto for The Rake’s Progress specifies nine scenes and an epilogue, derived from Hogarth’s cycle of paintings; Lepage and his set designer, Carl Fillion, supply eight: a glittering, cinematic gallery of tableaux vivants inspired by the early days of television. Stravinsky’s “Hogarthian-Mozartian” neoclassicism is jettisoned in favour of a nostalgic return to the period of the composition, the late 1940s and early 1950s. The opera was completed and premiered at La Fenice in Venice in 1951, but was soon taken up by companies in the English-speaking world, where it has remained, on the fringes of the repertoire at least, ever since.

The Rake’s Mozartian exemplar is, of course, Don Giovanni, whose demonic spirit is shared between the central figures, Tom Rakewell and Nick Shadow, his diabolical alter ego; but despite the faux-18th-century borrowings — snatches of Mozartian melody, dry recitative accompanied by harpsichord — Stravinsky’s opera is just as indebted to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and, especially, to Tchaikovsky’s three Pushkin-based masterpieces. Yet he always repays what he steals: Anne Trulove’s lullaby over the mad, sleeping Tom in Bedlam is the opera’s most heartfelt and sincere music, even though it is clearly derived from Maria’s Lullaby in Mazeppa.

In the Monnaie programme, Lepage justifies his updating by stating that “Stravinsky jazzed with Hogarth’s ideas in the same manner as he jazzed with baroque music”. The director and his colleagues (snazzy costumes by François Barbeau, sharp choreography by Michael Keegan-Dolan, beautiful lighting by Etienne Boucher) take the jazzification further by replacing Hogarth’s sin city, 18th-century London, with 1950s Las Vegas, via Hollywood. The ingénu cowboy, Tom, makes his progress from a little house on the prairie to the dazzling neon-lit vision of hell that the graveyard scene becomes here, set in a disused gaming house. Tom’s “London” home is now the terrace of a Sunset Boulevard mansion, complete with pool, where the newly enriched rake and his exotic bearded-lady wife, Baba the Turk, lounge around in swimsuits, downing cocktails.

Alarmingly, though (quite) amusingly, Tom silences his wife’s nagging by throwing her into the pool, from which she is rescued and resuscitated in the Auction scene by a hunky lifeguard. This is Lepage’s not entirely convincing solution to the problem created by turning the three acts into an evening of two unequal halves. You lose the joke of Baba being gagged at the end of Act 2 and continuing her chatter where she left off when she is uncovered as an auction item in Act 3. Lepage’s great coup de théâtre , though, is the graveyard card game, presided over by William Shimell’s magnetic, Jack Nicholson-like Shadow, depicted here as a degenerate conflation of Don Giovanni and Mephistopheles, returning to hell with his costume ablaze. Shimell, alas, won’t be coming to London, where the show will be completely recast.

Musically, the Brussels version was a low-key affair, diligently conducted by Kazushi Ono and, apart from Shimell, undersung. Laura Claycomb’s soubrettish Anne, Dagmar Peckova’s verbally impenetrable Baba and even Darren Jeffery’s (too youthful) Trulove didn’t make much of an impression. The young English tenor Andrew Kennedy, in the demanding title role, continues to display refined musical accomplishments, which made his mad scene especially moving, but earlier on he seemed underpowered. There is tremendous promise here, though.

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