The force of Verdi’s Macbeth always hits you like a sledgehammer.

Eerie, sweaty and sinister, this is a score whose raw, expressive power comes first and foremost from the world of Shakespeare’s ambiguous seers, the witches – and Verdi seems as much in thrall to their gory visions as do his antihero and heroine.

Perhaps that’s why his opera sometimes seems more like a staged graphic novel than a music drama: the main characters mostly reduced to instincts and reactions while the lurid world of the supernatural presses down around them. And perhaps that’s why Tim Albery’s rather sober production, the first in a trio of Shakespeare-flavoured productions at Opera North, doesn’t always hit the spot.

It’s not so much due to the lack of broomsticks and cauldrons, though there’s little that’s either thrilling or chilling about the way Albery sees those horrible hags. Here, the witches are a chorus of Mrs Mops, cleaners (or nurses) in drab smocks, who are first seen during the overture assisting – or sabotaging? – the birth of Lady Macbeth’s child before the foetus is unceremoniously dumped in the trash. They go on to be the stage managers of much of the action that follows, even to the point of giving Macbeth the pen and paper to write the letter to his wife that precipitates the regicide to follow. Come the Act III coven, and they’re back in Satan’s maternity unit, flinging babies around like rugby balls before plopping tiny crowns on their heads.

More black humour of that sort wouldn’t have gone amiss. But, in part thanks to Johan Engels’s monochrome designs and Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s drab, vaguely 1940s costuming, there are few moments here to freeze the blood. Oddly for Albery, whose strengths are usually found in storytelling, Banquo’s murder is clumsily handled, and his return as a ghost underwhelms. That everything takes place in the Stygian gloom of Bruno Poet’s lighting scheme doesn’t help.

Blame some of the emotional chill on the singing. The Italian soprano Antonia Cifrone certainly has the notes and range for Lady Macbeth’s exacting vocal demands. But her voice is a shade too small for such a dominating part, and there’s little of what the composer famously called the “harsh, strangled, grim” quality he was after. Robert Hayward’s Macbeth cuts an imposing figure, but his grainy baritone has more than a few muddy moments when it comes to Verdi’s highlying lyrical lines.

Never mind. This is a serious, intelligent show, which should tighten up during its travels across the country – as will the performances. And it already boasts two truly outstanding features: Peter Auty’s wonderfully ardent Macduff and Richard Farnes’s thrillingly intense conducting of the company orchestra.

In rep to May 24. Box office: 0870 1251898. Then touring to Nottingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Woking (www.operanorth.co.uk)

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