THE Welsh National Opera launches its first themed season this spring with a new production of Alban Berg’s 20th century work, Lulu.

A seedy, convoluted story, it’s set in a twilight world peopled with a rum collection of promiscuous avant-garde characters and has an atmosphere reminiscent of the film Cabaret albeit this one is much more sleazy.

Director David Pountney has chosen Free Spirit as the theme for two operas this month and Lulu herself is just that – a free spirit full of feminine power until the tables are turned in the last act and she becomes an exploited victim instead, forced into prostitution.

Much of the action takes place in and around what looks like a cleverly constructed cage full of ladders and lifts and with Lulu’s three dead husbands suspended from on high to add to the drama.

The whole cast deserves praise for adeptly wrapping their vocal chords around Berg’s highly structured and complicated score which, much of the time, is not exactly easy on the ear.

What with Lulu being a wife, a mistress, a killer, a blackmail victim, a prostitute, a cholera sufferer and finally dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper it’s not surprising it can often be a bit difficult to catch up.

If the aim is to paint a graphic, unsavoury picture of the underworld then it certainly succeeds.

But at a stretch of three-and-a-half hours this is not a night out for fidgets or the faint-hearted.

Further performances at the Wales Millennium Centre on February 16 and 23. Box office on 029 2063 6464 or via www.wmc.org.uk

3 out of 5