There are two Opera Australia DVDs of Madama Butterfly and, apart from the music and some of the performers, you could be watching two different operas. For Moffatt Oxenbould’s production – still going strong after 18 years – designers Peter England and Russell Cohen used Kabuki theatre as their inspiration with ninja-clad servants handing out props; sliding screens and a surrounding moat to represent the divide between Japanese and American culture. Cio-Cio-San, also sung by Japanese soprano Hiromi Omura, was dressed in a kimono, looking the true geisha.

For the Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour production, newly released on DVD, director Àlex Ollé from the groundbreaking Spanish theatre group La Fura Dels Baus takes an edgier and more political approach to this tragic love story set amid a clash of cultures. Here we are in the present day and the passionate, unscrupulous Pinkerton is a shiny-suited salesman intent on building a housing development in Nagasaki. Butterfly sports a full body tattoo, denim shorts and a Stars and Stripes T-shirt.

For the first act the clever set is a grove of bamboo atop a grassy knoll. For the second act everything is different. No more nature – it’s all building sites, derricks and long lines of displaced families with shopping trolleys containing their possessions filing across the open-air stage for the Humming Chorus.

Ollé says Pinkerton “represents a tsunami that wipes everything out of his path. He destroys Cio-Cio-San and everything that surrounds her. He destroys the environment so he can build what he likes.” Both productions are visually stunning and have their merits. For this reviewer, Russian tenor Georgy Vasiliev is a more passionate and interesting Pinkerton than James Egglestone. Omura is made for the part and shines in both versions. Brian Castles-Onion and his band keep the musical action moving along splendidly.