BEHIND the scenes English National Opera may seem like a leaky old frigate, battered by mountainous seas. But on stage all is shipshape for this searing production of Britten’s naval masterpiece.

Neil Armfield’s brutal staging won plaudits when Welsh National Opera did it eight years ago. It loses none of its demonic energy in this taut and tempestuous revival.

HMS Indomitable may have been reduced to a perpetually slithering hydraulic platform. But that only serves to tunnel our vision inescapably on to the homoerotic collision of good and evil that is hinted at in Herman Melville’s novella and made explicit in every savage chord of Britten’s score — the sadistic destruction of the ingenuous and beautiful seaman Budd by his jealous superior, Claggart.

The absence of detailed naval trappings has another advantage: it universalises the drama. Yes, on one level this tragedy is rooted in the phobia about mutiny that gripped the Royal Navy in 1797 — to say nothing of the Senior Service’s “rum, sodomy and the lash” traditions. But Armfield also deftly evokes the persecution of innocents that goes on in many closed, male environments — whether boarding schools, prisons or military barracks.

His other great achievement is to work with the music, not against it.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the treatment of ENO’s male chorus, much augmented and in tremendous form. The shanties, the spine-chilling bloodlust voiced as the Indomitable gives chase to the hated French, and most of all the churning, inarticulate grunts of rage after Budd’s execution — all these are hurled straight at us. It’s electrifying.

So, too, is the orchestra, under Andrew Litton’s impassioned direction.

Aside from the odd fluffed trumpet note, it’s the most accomplished playing to come from this pit all season — not just thunderously melodramatic, but also a superb delineation of a score with dark, complex and sometimes subliminal cross-references. And in 150 minutes, the rapport between pit and singers never falters.

On stage one towering performance dominates. John Tomlinson’s Claggart is a Hammer horror creation: an immense, baleful voice matched by the sort of make-up they favour in Transylvanian coffins, and an aura that could chill molten lava.

The contrast with Simon Keenlyside’s irrepressibly joyous Budd — hanging upside down from beams as he sings — could hardly be more striking. Keenlyside takes time to warm up, but he delivers his pre-execution soliloquy with wonderfully noble tone.

Timothy Robinson’s Vere is less vividly drawn. He floats high-lying lines beautifully, but never externalises enough of the Captain’s moral anguish.

Elsewhere, however, fine performances abound. Adrian Thompson’s blustery Red Whiskers, Gwynne Howells’s touching Dansker and Toby Stafford-Allen’s horn-piping Donald are all outstanding in a show that has the shattering power of a broadside.

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