Saturday night in Leeds. Binge-drinking, gangs of tattooed goths, the glint of knives, chains and body jewellery, street fights, the pallor of a bad trip. And that's before you've even stepped outside the opera house.

For the third of Opera North's three Shakespeare operas, John Fulljames, directing his new production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, has created a dark fantasy of our time and of all time. He's by no means the first to have done it: one almost expected to hear the strains of Leonard Bernstein's Somewhere drifting up as this new young Romeo and Juliet played out the eternal game of fatal love in a time of community strife.

Johan Engels has designed the stage as a black-tiled tomb. Death is there from the start: a suspended black dais, both bridal bed and grave, rises to Juliette's realm as white-winged angel-bird, and descends to the hell of crazed carousing and conflict. Vast orange balloons bubble up with the champagne. Mercutio (Stephan Loges in fine form) is a party punk. Stephano (a vocally scintillating Frances Bourne) is a graffiti-spraying goth. A single patch of electric-green grass relieves the gloom as Friar Laurence snips his wheatgrass and marries the lovers.

So far, so good - and the physical and vocal youth of the two principals, the New Jersey-born Leonardo Capalbo as Roméo, and the Slovenian soprano Bernarda Bobro as Juliette, is both alluring and moving. Although Capalbo's robust tenor is incapable of fining itself down for the exquisite poetry of Gounod's writing, Bobro's girlish and wide-eyed soprano is a sweet and constant delight.

The chorus and ballet elements in Gounod are always a problem, and, although the ballet proper is omitted here, the disco-dance movement and choreography (Ben Wright) is messy and ineffectual. While this aspect of the opera hasn't been solved, the company is to be congratulated on opting for a judiciously edited version of Gounod's original spoken dialogue - and in excellent French, too (with surtitles).

So, it's an uneven evening. But with strong supporting performances from Peter Wedd as Tybalt, Yvonne Howard as a risibly whoreish Gertrude and Henry Waddington as Frère Laurent, the production should grow ever more confident and polished on tour.

Grand, Leeds (0844 8482720), tonight and Friday; then Nottingham, Newcastle, Salford and Woking

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