CIVILISATION is laid low by low-tech trickery — call it terrorism if you like. What else, really, are the wooden horse and its fanatical occupants? It is not often that you are confronted on the operatic stage with an image of such immediacy as the burning fuselage that opens Richard Jones’s production of the first half of Berlioz’s Virgil epic, and it is to his credit that he doesn’t go on to bang any obvious drums.

The opera whisks its audience in medias res, and expects them to know what’s going on — no allowances for the classically illiterate here, so mug up your Aeneid before you go. There is no overture, just a jolly chorus of Trojans celebrating the apparent defeat of the Greeks, but underpinned with a jangling anxiety and sung by a crowd in the final twitchy stages of post-traumatic stress disorder. Then the stage clears and we are left with Cassandra shrieking her unheard message of doom into the black void.

These Trojans, of course, are Americans, and this Cassandra (Susan Bickley) a dowdy middle-aged misfit not entirely dissimilar from some of our own lone-voice ladies (no wonder no one’s listening). And this is her show — she holds the stage for the whole of Act I, a hugely committed portrayal of desperation, singing her heart out, clawing vainly at Priam’s shoulder and getting a knockout jab from besuited FBI goons for her unpatriotic outbursts.

This updating doesn’t jar because action and music are of a piece: myth is certainly de-glamorised, but Berlioz works with the real stuff of history, the neurotic impulses that mean disaster can also be the root of heroism and future glory. The destruction of Troy is also the beginning of Rome, and the final scene, where the Trojan women brandishing their lyres — for which read guitars — confront ravening Greek soldiers before strapping themselves to bombs for mass suicide is both an affirmation of human dignity and a reminder that apparently opposite phenomena are closer than we like to think.

It is drama on a big scale, and although this is half an opera (and a mere 90 minutes of music) it doesn’t feel like half an evening’s entertainment.

It visits an exhausting range of emotion, Berlioz’s uniquely vivid sound-world conveyed with increasing sureness by the orchestra under Paul Daniel: the rapt grief of Andromache mourning a President Kennedy lookalike Hector to a plangent clarinet, the breathless wonderment as the horse is wheeled into the city in a parade of massive insecurity, the stunning appearance of Hector’s ghost as a bloody Banquo.

The Capture of Troy is also about the emergence of the hero who will create the apotheosis of Troy, and John Daszak’s forceful Aeneas is the link between this and episode two, for which we will have to wait until May.

If you think that heroes don’t dress in sports casual, this startlingly original production of an extraordinary, uplifting work might change your mind.

In repertory until February 27. Box office: 020-7632 8300