“BE APPALLED!” leers the ringmaster, introducing the cast of Alban Berg’s sprawling tragic farce. If only. Despite a text replete with all the things (graphic sex and death, generally in close combination) that usually cause a ruckus, this is one of your more restrained ENO shows.

This production, by Richard Jones, first appeared three years ago, and a second viewing makes a few things clear. One: by his standards Jones doesn’t engage too deeply with the work; two: Lisa Saffer’s performance as the disaster-zone heroine is simply staggering; and three: maybe once was enough.

The primary motivation of opera has always been sex, but Lulu stands out for its single-minded concentration on sex as blood-sport. Lulu is the literal femme fatale: everyone dies. At the same time she is a complaisant child whose thousand costume changes — baby doll, Lady Di, vamp, tart, dominatrix, victim — and chameleon tendencies are behaviour learnt in childhood when dad first put her on the streets: I’ll be whatever you want.

It is their own fantasies that the men around Lulu cannot handle. She is commodity and sex goddess, always pimped by her current lover in the same way as the heavy-irony Jungfrau (“virgin”) Railway shares which boom and crash and prompt one of her many flights: if that’s how you want it, Lulu is a critique of capitalism, too.

And it boasts the densest score, a fiesta of musical acrostics and encodings, overlaid with a web of reminiscence and expressed through the widest possible variety of sound-worlds. Paul Daniel handles this with varying success, scrappy near the beginning, but getting hold of the incredibly seductive string tones that bring an overarching Romanticism to the story — notably at the moment Lulu gets butchered by Jack the Ripper — ripping into brassy interludes and having fun with the various allusions to jazz and dance-hall; but it is never compelling as a unity, only in episodes.

You couldn’t say the same of Saffer, the slinky fantasy figure at the centre, who sings Berg’s spiky music as though it is Handel, and is about the only singer to make it actually sound like music. It is astonishing stuff: seductive, sensual, giving tantalising hints of the human inside, and accompanied everywhere by the alto sax that expresses what Lulu cannot.

There are other neat performances in the menagerie around her — particularly Susan Parry and Robert Poulton — but the aesthetic is all Koons-kitsch and a sense of disdain: it is show-within-show, make-believe and decoration, and no heart. And three-odd hours of disengagement can be wearisome.

• Box office: 020-7632 8300. Until May 13