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Brutalist grey, its deck gently curved, HMS Indomitable looms over Michael Grandage’s production of Britten’s Billy Budd. Half-skeleton, half-cage, the ship is relentlessly claustrophobic, its hard edges softened only by coils of rope, hammocks and Paule Constable’s subtle, painterly lighting. No wonder the opera’s crowd of male bodies – clad here in spotless Napoleonic naval uniforms and grubby workwear – carries a palpable charge: visceral, violent, erotic. Thanks to the curved deck, those standing centre-stage of Christopher Oram’s set appear as if through a fish-eye lens or one of the officer’s telescopes. In this floating world at war, everyone is subject to scrutiny.

Premiered at Glyndebourne in 2010, Grandage’s production is now in the hands of revival director Ian Rutherford. The lines are firmly drawn between the goodness of the piece’s “angel” Billy Budd and the malevolence of its villain, John Claggart, whose “sexual discharge gone evil” (librettist EM Forster’s words) results in Budd’s death. Budd swings across the stage, lithe as a gymnast, unique in his physical ease. Claggart cowers and barks. The love “that could not speak its name” at the opera’s 1951 premiere has here found other ways to communicate; in one scene, Claggart bullies the terrified Novice in a chokehold that is simultaneously, unmistakably an embrace.

Performed by baritone Thomas Mole (Budd) and bass-baritone Sam Carl (Claggart), these vital, polar roles were persuasive. Mole’s voice was burnished where Carl’s tended to muddiness lower down and ferocious power up top. Mole’s double-speed wittering in his scene with the Captain was a painful snapshot of over-keen youth. Carl’s flashes of lush baritonal beauty only increased the plot’s crucial tensions.

Yet neither was so colourful or so uniquely characterised as to stand out for long from the work’s general panoply of male voices. The rich polish of the chorus’s blend and occasionally overwhelming heft of its sound cut effectively against the men’s pitiful physical state. There were numerous fine performances among the other named roles. Clive Bayley’s Dansker was warmly sympathetic and Laurence Kilsby’s Novice skin-crawling. William Thomas, Dingle Yandell and Daniel Okulitch competed as stiff, stentorian types. Conducted by Nicholas Carter, the London Philharmonic Orchestra rolled and surged beneath the action, seductive or brutal as the situation demanded.

But this opera’s effectiveness ultimately rests – like the fate of its characters – on the qualities of its Captain Vere. An exceptional exponent of chaotic, unhinged characters, Allan Clayton may not have seemed an obvious Vere. Yet here he stood taller and stiller than ever, exuding be-wigged bonhomie, his luminous, sensitive tenor carving across the opera’s darkness – first as the voice of reason, then of conscience. His final scene (alone on stage, wig discarded) was quietly devastating: an intimate portrait of human vulnerability.

• Until 30 July.