Manon Lescaut is twerking — should we applaud or shudder? 

Last seen clambering over the MDF wheelchair ramps of Laurent Pelly’s Royal Opera House production of Jules Massenet’s opéra comique, Manon the minx, the ‘sphinx étonnant’ of Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, reappears in two guises as part of Welsh National Opera’s Fallen Women season; as the heroine of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and the antiheroine of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, both directed by Mariusz Trelinski.

The connection between her story and La traviata, the third opera in WNO’s season, is deeper than a coincidence of job descriptions. In La dame aux camélias, the source for Verdi’s opera, Marguerite’s lover, Armand, buys a copy of Prévost’s novel at the auction of the dead courtesan’s effects. Marguerite/Violetta is a martyr to both kinds of consumption: the frenzied spending spree of a rapidly expanding Paris and a heavily romanticised disease. Compared with Manon, the wild child whose head is turned simultaneously by a handsome seminarian and a glimpse of the high life afforded by low morals, she is also a saint.

In Massenet’s bel époque bonbon, Manon’s reckless greed is diluted with girlish sentimentality. In Puccini’s drama, animal attraction — to des Grieux and to luxury — is all. Manon Lescaut is a score with dirt under its fingernails and pheromones in its armpits. It doesn’t pay to get too misty-eyed about Puccini’s heroines. But Trelinski goes further, turning a capricious, greedy, sensual teenager into a misogynistic fantasy figure with a heart of pure fibreglass, an Allen Jones hatstand with a lirico-spinto voice. A graduate of the Lodz Film School, he has taken the many re-presentations of Manon’s story from Prévost to the films of Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jean Aurel as a cue to deconstruct the myth of predatory female sexuality, with Manon as a sort of ur-whore.