John Webster’s 1614 play The Duchess of Malfi – with its sex, violence, murder aplenty – deserved an operatic treatment. But Webster’s been rather unlucky with this one. A collaboration between ENO and Punchdrunk, the theatre company that occupies deserted buildings and invites the audience to walk around their productions, the opera is housed inside a Soviet-style abandoned office-block in remotest, deepest East London. Arriving at what’s called ‘The Site’ (very Kafkaesque) a steward hands out white masks which, apparently, must not be removed. All very Eyes Wide Shut I thought. But fearing for the wellbeing of my expensive glasses I refused. Which didn’t go down too well.

Groping through the dark is what to do once inside. Rooms crammed with derelict computers and papers strewn over the floor emerge out of corridors filled with thespy dry ice. But no live music yet. Instead The Duchess of Malfi’s composer, Torsten Rasch, goes into default mode with a marginally tart electronic drone, like thousands of horror film composers before him. Scrabbling through the pitch black holding my mask, listening to this tired electronica, I was not encouraged.

Searching desperately for something – anything! – of substance, I stumbled on an orgiastic dance scene. Later the cooing of woodwind instruments and singing beckoned. Then more flannelling through the dark until a corner was turned and, behold, a choir of string instruments playing what sounded like re-hashed Berg. Singers were constantly in evidence, but it was impossible to zone into anything they sang.

And so it continued for two hours until I found myself in another space – or perhaps somewhere I’d been before – to witness mezzo Claudia Huckle, playing the Duchess, being strangled and hung upside down in her agent provocateur-style underwear. You had to admire her pluck, and the balls of counter-tenor Andrew Watts, who ran naked through the space with only theatre-blood covering his dignity. Sort of.

Yes, it is unusual to reach the end of an opera review without saying much about the music. Rasch’s score was, however, merely functional. It did an okay job of conjuring up a gothic atmosphere somewhere in the menace/trepidation/dread/fear ballpark. But his Bergian/Mahlerian/Straussian expressionism, with an occasional suggestion of Birtwistleian muscle, was also obstinately unmemorable.

So ENO and Punchdrunk serve up a Ghost Train for grown-ups, with a hint of well-heeled kink stealing a response from the audience. As a special dispensation, journalists were handed the programme before the performance, but that’s a luxury audiences won’t have. My advice to attendees: bone up on Webster’s play before you arrive, or the plot will pass you by. That sense of alienation, of profound disorientation – of audience manipulation – is of course their aim. But hooking such aspirations off a dramatic structure that’s dependent on its narrative arc to function seems wrong-footed. It would have been better to come up with something original? A new structure with those ideas inbuilt?

Philip Clark