As we found our seats, a druidic figure wearing a string of vapes as a necklace sat on stage swathed in white fabric and smoke, emitting close-miked mouth noises amid a rising chorus of percussive hisses and rattles. Then dancing flashlights, reverb and thunderous drum rolls. Later came monologues delivered with quiet, skin-crawling sincerity or pounded out as a kind of manic rap and comically dysfunctional text chats projected on the backcloth. Not to mention the dance breaks. There was an angular, hyper-controlled trio fluent in the language of modern ballet and a hands-on-hips traditional number as faux-folk lyrics scrolled in gothic script and a hefty synthetic beat throbbed below.

The first collaboration between Jennifer Walshe and Philip Venables – two of the most distinctive creators in music theatre today – The Alonetimes was never likely to adhere to the conventional playbook of opera. The programme for its UK premiere describes the work as “a fragmented archaeology of personal stories”. Alternatively: there is no single linear plot but instead six performers, who step constantly in and out of unnamed roles, switch between playing instruments and singing, form a taut Greek chorus and stand alone in the spotlights.

Care and conviction … Vanessa Porter in The Alonetimes. Photograph: Cyril Marcilhacy

The text is at once very online (hello, “soft looksmaxxing”) and very sweary – “super-fucking awkward!” intones the Greek chorus in one scene – but also fleetingly poetic in its observations on life, love and loneliness. The music obsesses over short loops (frantic violin lines, for instance, that might have escaped from one of Bartók’s folksier scores) and hammers away rhythmically like a sonic answer to strobe lighting. There are moments of ethereal beauty, too: quiet drones, gentle humming, disjointed suspensions on the accordion, timpani sliding in unison with a single voice, a brief six-part chorale.

Above all, though, The Alonetimes is funny. Not because of the contemporary references and the jokes about dating apps – but because these six performers brought to life people we’ve all been or met with absolute care and conviction. Oskar McCarthy’s turn as the instructor of an over-65s aerobics class – “hi everyone”, he murmured, the swerve into slippers-and-Ovaltine provoking gales of laughter – was one comic highlight. But Andreas Borregaard, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Loré Lixenberg, Vanessa Porter and Adam Starkie were every bit as virtuosic as they negotiated the work’s hyperactive tragicomedy. Sometimes baffling and often bonkers, this was also an exhilaratingly enjoyable piece of contemporary music theatre.