Wozzeck is not an opera for everyone, as the people who left after the first scene – a full 12 minutes into Thursday night’s show – will testify. However you package it, it remains a bleak tale of madness, exploitation and infidelity that opens with despair and ends with death. Richard Jones’s revived staging for WNO creates a compellingly claustrophobic world of automata, whose humanising instincts and urges have long since been sacrificed to the bland efficiency of life’s ever-moving production line.

The set is reduced to a one-size-fits-all landscape, a world where all beauty and particularity have been annihilated. Perpetually and ominously present, growing parasitically until it fills the greater part of the stage, is an orange skip filled with the empty bean cans – Wozzeck’s prescribed diet. These tins become the idée fixe of Paul Steinberg’s design, their shiny menace constantly reinvented, most notably arranged in rows upon towering shelves that dwarf that human drama beneath them.

While some operatic title roles that are less than pivotal – Jenufa and Turandot come to mind – there are others so dominant that with them the work lives or dies. Wozzeck is one such, so when we learned that owing to illness Christopher Purves would not be singing there was some uneasy stirring from the audience. Alexander Ashworth, however, brought such security and dramatic conviction to the role that any sense of him as a substitute was forgotten. His physical stature – towering over all the rest of the cast – gave a real pathos to his portrayal of Wozzeck as an overgrown man-child. Vocally things were a little underpowered, yet there was a fragility to his softer delivery that worked dramatically.

The supporting cast were a joy. Wioletta Chodowicz’ magnificently full-blooded Marie provided one of the most satisfying vocal experiences of the night. In Clive Bayley’s Doctor (pictured) we had a sinisterly genial grandfather-type positively oozing unpredictability and menace, as disturbing as Graham Clark’s deranged Captain, whose vocal contortions were almost as impressive as his physical ones.

Despite the superb onstage action, the evening belonged to Lothar Koenigs and the WNO orchestra. In so deliberately fragmented a work it falls to the orchestra to provide the emotional and atmospheric core, to guide the audience and keep them from succumbing to too severe a bout of Germanic alienation – a challenge to which WNO rose spectacularly.

Intelligent, disturbing and deeply moving – if it’s food for thought you’re after, you can’t do better than WNO’s Wozzeck.