For reasons that are understandable only in terms of visual appeal, Jonathan Miller has updated the action of his new production of La bohème for English National Opera to the Paris of the 1930s. Still, visual appeal counts for much, and there is no denying the impact, set against the gaudy excesses of the London Coliseum’s decor, of Isabella Bywater’s adroit designs, with their celebration of the work of photographers Cartier-Bresson and, especially, Brassaï (Gyula Halász). The bohemians’ garret occupies the upper part of one of two boxes that revolve and lock into place neatly to give us convincing locations for the opera’s four acts (Act III’s toll gate is AWOL, but we imagine it somewhere out there). This scheme has the advantage of placing the action in the context of the streetscape and works well, for instance, for the festive frolics around Cafe Momus. It is much less satisfactory, however, for the scenes within the flat – including Mimi and Rodolfo’s meeting and Mimi’s death bed (actually, death armchair) – which seem to be taking pace a very long way away.

More than once, the title of a sixties’ rock album floated into my mind: Music from a Dolls’ House. It didn’t help that the volume of the singing – that of Alfie Boe as Rodolfo especially – was similarly Lilliputian in scale when compared with that of conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s large (and largely unrestrained) orchestral forces.

Melody Moore’s Mimi, by contrast, was as powerful of voice as of figure (can medical science have witnessed the death of so strapping a consumptive?). The Musetta of her fellow American ENO debutante Hanan Alattar was no less powerfully equipped vocally, though a harsh edge to her voice rather grated. In her jealous swain Marcello (Roland Wood) – as, indeed, in Boe’s Rodolfo, Pauls Putnins’s Colline and David Stout’s Schaunard – I could see nothing of the “upper-class boys who think squalor is very romantic”, which is what the programme told me I should be seeing. What I heard, however – from them and from all others involved in this always entertaining production – was a pleasing presentation of some of 19th-century opera’s most glorious music fashioned to tell one of its most touching tales.

Performances of La bohème continue tonight and on February 21, 24 and 27, and March 4, 6 and 8. Box office 0871 911 0200 (www.eno.org)