The Coronation of Poppea, Coliseum, London

ENO goes the full Monteverdi

The Coronation of Poppea was almost as long coming for its composer, Monteverdi, as it is for us, its audience. But when the moment does arrive with that ravishing final duet we are almost – almost – inclined to overlook the skewed morality that has brought the happy couple, Nero and Poppea, to their momentous union.

I've yet to see a production that counters the sweetness of the music, the rapture of its yearning suspensions, with some sort of dramatic question-mark. Chen Shi-Zheng at English National Opera goes for broke to underline its diaphanous beauty, presenting Kate Royal like Kate Moss at some outlandish fashion show with human dragonflies hovering in the air around her. Now that's what I call the full Monteverdi.

Perhaps Shi-Zheng felt that the sweetness would inevitably leave a bitter aftertaste and dramatic purpose would thus be served. I don't know. I left the theatre feeling, "Gosh, that was gorgeous." Perhaps it's not possible to feel much more than that for Monteverdi and his librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello's rather sketchy, self-serving characters – not least the vain, ambitious and ruthless Poppea.

She is, in Shi-Zheng's perception, a supermodel siren luring everyone to destruction in this operatic soap. Immorality becomes fashionably chic in his design and dance-conscious staging. The set designer Walt Spangler gives us a shimmering, open stage on which "the good ship Nerone" has dropped anchor, bow protruding from the wings like a diving board.

I'm not quite sure what all the aquatic imagery is meant to convey other than some fanciful idea that Poppea is indeed a siren and that all around her are not waving but drowning. Into a projected backdrop of watery images – the "rain of tears" highlighted in the text, perhaps – are mixed huge close-ups of the glamorous Poppea. As the hopelessly infatuated Ottone (Tim Mead) sings: "All my reason may shout Drusilla, but my heart whispers Poppea", we see her ghostly image, hair blowing in the breeze like a movie commercial for some new colour conditioner. It's that kind of show – the ecstasy of love as a glossy fashion-shoot.

Then there are the allegorical figures of Fortune, Virtue and Love, who look like they've stepped out of Mamma Mia!, and Arnalta, Poppea's aged nurse, who is cast as a pantomime dame, relished and then some by Christopher Gillett.

But, in Shi-Zheng's defence, it's hard to take the piece too seriously. It was conceived for the People's Opera in Venice and, like all the best soaps, it gave the people exactly what the temper of the times demanded – love, lust, deception and murder. Musically, the style is a dramatic recitative or 20 too far, with sumptuous but overworked harpsichord- and chitarrone-infused continuo underpinning the florid, stuttering vocal declamations.

But Clifford Bartlett and Peter Holman's edition is thoroughly embraced by Laurence Cummings, whose feeling for the improvisatory rubato of the piece feels so utterly authentic. And the entire cast have been very well-schooled in the style so that when the musical hot-spots do arrive there's a very real sense of release in those aching vocal melismas.

A predictable highlight of the production is the death of Robert Lloyd's commanding Seneca – a shrewd piece of star casting delivering the requisite charisma in spades, though not for the first or last time I just wanted the Orange Blossom Dance Company to take a slow boat out of the proceedings.

Lucy Crowe's vivacious Drusilla and Mead's vocally and physically lissom Ottone redefine cross-dressing with their plot to murder Poppea, Doreen Curran's wronged Ottavia makes something rather seductive of her scorn, and, while I would have welcomed a voice of more "masculine" duskiness for Nerone, Anna Grevelius cuts a virile, if petite, figure.

Which leaves the glamorous and creamy-voiced Royal, whose own heavily marketed star-status right now would give pause even to Poppea. How convenient is that?

In rep to 6 November (0870 145 0200)