Handel’s Messiah, with its Christian pageantry and Hallelujah Chorus, for which audiences still stand following the example of an 18th-century monarch, is, for better or worse, part of the national fabric. Deborah Warner’s staging for ENO is a courageous attempt, successful in part, to retrieve the work from the religionists and traditionalists and discover its universal dimension.

It begins well with Comfort Ye as a lament for lonely people everywhere: a woman ironing, two young men at computer screens, a girl watching TV. But rather than impose her own overarching scenario, Warner teases out a series of narrative threads. The Virgin Birth involves a teenager whose joy is expressed in implausible post-natal acrobatics. The Christmas music accompanies a school nativity play, the adoration of the shepherds neatly, if exaggeratedly, turned into the doting of parents. The Passion story becomes that of a society coming to terms with violence and death, determined to make a better world. The pomp of the Hallelujah Chorus is jettisoned in favour of back-slapping, idealistic bonhomie.

A number of tableaux stand out, among them a ravishing candlelit scene (designer Tom Pye, lighting Jean Kalman) ending Act 1 and a memorable He Was Despised, sung with grief-laden pathos by Catherine Wyn-Rogers over a writhing victim — the touched onlookers a community ensemble assembled for the occasion.

Sophie Bevan and John Mark Ainsley also bring Handelian sophistication to their solo roles. Brindley Sherratt has a more rough- hewn but effective dramatic address.

The ENO Chorus has done well to memorise parts, even if the delivery, like that of the orchestra, is hardly up to the highest standards heard today. Laurence Cummings’s brisk direction has less to do with period style than with complementing Warner’s vision, a flawed but searching take on a national treasure.

Until 11 December. Information: 0871 911 0200; www.eno.org. BBC Radio 3, 25 December .