Benedict Andrews’ long-awaited, controversial production is a match made in heaven.

Lyndon Terracini’s current Opera Australia season has come in for a degree of criticism for its relative conservatism, and let’s face it: The Marriage of Figaro (in Jeremy Sams’ comprehensible, colloquial English translation) hardly seems a box office gamble. But what we have here turns out to be possibly the most interesting piece of programming this year.

The company has taken an old bums-on-seats warhorse and invited one of Australia’s boldest theatre directors to interpret it for the modern day, at the risk of alienating a proportion of their die-hard subscriber base.  If this is a financial or artistic gamble for OA, I for one hope it pays off, for what Benedict Andrews, his creative team and a mostly excellent cast have given us has to be one of the most entertaining shows currently on the Australian stage.

By setting Beaumarchais’ tale of class conflict and social revolution within a Vaucluse-style mansion in a gated community, Andrews’ concept is elegantly simple and effortlessly successful. He holds a mirror up to our obsession with the closeted protection of private wealth and the subsequent exploitation of the new servant class required...