There is nothing remotely English about Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre as staged at English National Opera by Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus, and I mean that in the best way possible. Despite the laidback flirtation with obscenity undertaken by our homegrown YBA’s, as a nation our attitude to sex is still effectively summed up by the Carry On films — skittishly prurient as a schoolboy, flinging back the curtain with one hand while pressing the other firmly over the eyes.

Set in the nightmarish world of Breughelland, an apocalyptic landscape fresh from the imaginations of Bosch or Breughel, the absurdist opera is a sort of perverted Waiting for Godot. Its cast of eccentric victims (which include the effeminate poseur Prince Go-Go, S&M-loving couple Astradamors and Mescalina, and drunken layabout Piet the Pot) must await the arrival of death in the form of the demonic Nekrotzar, and with him the destruction of their world.

At the centre — quite literally — of the production is the figure of ‘Claudia’ (so nicknamed by her designers), the 20ft high fibreglass model of a naked female body that squats fleshily across the entire stage, her rearing head contorted in what could be agony or ecstasy. A Rabelaisian fantasy of a figure, Claudia is all penetrable orifices and protruding buttocks, and it is her body that provides both backdrop and the landscape of Breughelland, vomiting forth characters from her mouth or passing them through her all-too vividly rendered bowels.

Composed in the iconoclastic 1970’s, Ligeti described Le Grand Macabre as an ‘anti-anti-opera’. In an age that had all but thrown opera from the battlements, this was an experiment — a self-reflexive commentary that exposed the genre’s weaknesses while also celebrating its glorious excesses. Musical boxes, electric doorbells and a selection of car horns supplement the usual symphonic suspects, rendering a score whose schizophrenic musical moods nod toward Monteverdi, Beethoven and Rossini, among others, in spasms atmospheric and surprisingly tuneful clamourings.

Under the supremely controlled baton of Baldur Bronnimann ENO’s orchestra delivered a stylish and witty account of the work, providing support to the vocal contortions of an excellent ensemble cast. Of particular delight was Andrew Watts’s prancing Prince Go-Go and Frode Olsen’s beautifully judged comedic turn as downtrodden astronomer Astradamors.

After a complicated riot of sex, death, fast-food and existentialism the piece collapses into deliberate anticlimax (the only fitting ending to an anti-anti-opera, surely?) Nekrotzar reveals himself as powerless, concluding in true nihilistic fashion: ‘The question remains unanswered/Let’s start boozing all over.’ I for one will drink to that . . .

There are further performances at the London Coliseum tomorrow, next Thursday, Saturday (October 3) and October 9. Box office: 0871 911 0200 (www.eno.org).