There are certain combinations that should never go together: chalk and cheese, oil and water, Verdi and classic American soul – though that doesn't dissuade Chris Monks from having a try. No opera is safe from Monks's satiric reinventions. He has transformed Don Giovanni into a Victorian conjurer, Figaro into a personal fitness trainer and Carmen into a checkout girl in love with a Premiership footballer. Now he gives us Rigoletto reimagined as an off-colour standup comedian playing the Yorkshire club circuit of the 1970s. Many of the details transform as seamlessly as Jonathan Miller's classic mafioso production for ENO: the duke's court becomes Dukes' WMC, where the carpets are sticky and the band plays second fiddle to the bingo machine. Gilda becomes Gina, a waitress, while renaissance intrigue is replaced with an atmosphere of corrupt malevolence reminiscent of David Peace's Red Riding series.

The joy of Monks's mashups is that they wilfully ignore the composer's intentions while remaining faithful to the original score. This one, however, seems unable to decide whether to be an operatic parody or a 1970s juke-box musical, and rather confusingly settles for both. The soul standards are delivered by a tight band of actor-musicians in bright polyester. But there's no clear rationale why Adam Baxter's Duke should have both La Donna e Mobile and Ken Boothe's Everything I Own in his repertoire.

There seems almost to be a sense of anxiety that the audience might not tolerate too much Verdi without introducing a blast of wah-wah guitar. It also places a huge demand on the performers to accommodate both styles, though Ngo Omene Ngofa has an extraordinary ability to evoke both Renata Tebaldi and Minnie Riperton, and Jimmy Johnston gives a mind-boggling account of what might have happened if Bernard Manning had been born a baritone.