Forty years old? If Harrison Birtwistle's abrasive music-drama had been written yesterday it would still seem as violently contemporary as a mugging on a very mean street. Whether it is compelling enough to sustain two different productions in London this spring remains to be seen.

But English National Opera will need to produce something pretty devastating at the Young Vic next month to match Music Theatre Wales's shock-impact staging. Devised by Michael McCarthy in 1998, it has been revived with tremendous energy, savage irony and, in places, disarming pathos. Rather like the piece itself, in fact.

Birtwistle's chamber-ensemble score (vigorously delivered under Michael Rafferty's direction) is as discordant and aggressive as anything ever penned by a British composer. But it is also a virtuosic combination of the rude, raucous and avant-garde. And because the drama is done like a recurring ritual - a literally vicious cycle of murder, love quest and callous rejection repeated four times (with a twist at the end) - it is easy to pick out the musical threads and follow them through the piece.

As for the action, that famously translates an “innocent” Punch and Judy show into a Clockwork Orange scenario: an underclass antihero psychopathically turning the tables on authority figures and getting away with it. Perhaps it's meant as an indictment of our dysfunctional society; perhaps an exploration of suppressed dark urges lurking inside us all. Either way, the story is hurled out with compulsive relish by this cast. In a “rough theatre” set where the chief feature is four nooses gradually filled by effigies of Punch's victims, they act with just the right sort of heightened, expressionist gestures.

And from the cock-crows of Gwion Thomas's superb Punch to the stratospheric coloratura swoops of Allison Bell's Lolita-like Polly, they aren't afraid to use their voices in the way that Birtwistle uses instruments: with no limits. Carol Rowlands makes a stunningly grotesque Judy, turned on sexually by her own impending murder. Jeremy Huw Williams's Choregos goes from controlling ringmaster to blubbering victim; and Peter Hoare and Nicholas Folwell are memorably repulsive as Lawyer and Doctor, spouting conventional morality and being butchered for their pains.

Further performances tonight and tomorrow. Don't take the kids.

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