Steven Page as Professor Filipp Filippovich, Peter Hoare as Sharikov. Monika Rittershaus

In 1926, Soviet authorities banned "A Dog's Heart," a novella that satirized the communist regime's attempt to create a new kind of world populated by new Soviet citizens. In the book, an upper-crust professor adopts a stray dog and decides to experiment on him: he takes the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead, drunken Bolshevik and implants them into the dog, transforming it into a crude human being with horrible manners and an immediate affinity for the Soviet system.

The man-dog, Sharikov, soon begins terrorizing the professor. He floods his luxurious flat, pontificates about Friedrich Engels and aligns himself with the communist functionaries trying to annex part of the professor's flat. Eventually, Sharikov denounces the professor to the authorities as a counter-revolutionary. Fed up, the professor removes Sharikov's human body parts and turns him back into a dog.

The book's thinly veiled criticism of the new Soviet system helped ruin the career of author Mikhail Bulgakov, whose work thereafter was largely suppressed. Not until 1987 was "A Dog's Heart" finally published in the Soviet Union. Now, Russian composer Alexander Raskatov and British director Simon McBurney have turned Bulgakov's story into an opera that is running for a limited time at the English National Opera.

The opera is Mr. Raskatov's brainchild—it was he who chose "A Dog's Heart" as the storyline—but it is Mr. McBurney's vivid staging that makes the production worth seeing. The dramatic, shifting geometry of the set, the film clips and Soviet graphics projected onto the stage, and the intensely physical performances are what linger after the final curtain drops. Unusually for an opera, it is the plot and the drama that dominate rather than the music.

This is a first foray into opera for Mr. McBurney, who is best known as the founder of the experimental theater company Complicite. "Very few operas I find dramatically successful," he says, adding that the "brutal production restrictions," including short rehearsal periods, also made the genre unattractive to him. But Mr. McBurney says he agreed to work on "A Dog's Heart" after developing a rapport with Mr. Raskatov, and out of fondness for Bulgakov, whose story he found "brilliantly dramatic, and very, very funny."

Mr. Raskatov is new to opera, too. Born in Moscow in 1953, he left Russia during the tumult of the post-Soviet collapse, finally settling in Paris. He's best known for completing, in 2007, the unfinished Ninth Symphony of the late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke.

His avant-garde score for "A Dog's Heart" is laced with Russian folk music and militaristic, revolutionary notes. This is contemporary music, and there are few soaring arias or lyrical passages. In the opening scene, a singer giving voice to the dog snarls and barks through a megaphone. "This is an absurd and very eccentric production—I really wanted it to be this way," Mr. Raskatov says. "I wanted to find this energy, this fearsome energy that existed in the Soviet Union of the '20s and '30s." Set in 1925, the opera opens with an emaciated dog (a skeletal puppet operated by several puppeteers) struggling through the snowy streets of Moscow. When the professor finds the dog, he takes him home and nicknames him Sharik, the Russian equivalent of Spot or Rover.

Puppeteers maneuver a skeletal Sharik. Monika Rittershaus

Played by Steven Page, the professor is a famous surgeon who lives in a grand flat with servants and caviar. Nancy Allen Lundy plays his maid with great comic effect, springing to his aid with exaggerated leaps and bounds. Soon, a band of proletarians from the local housing committee barges in to demand that the professor give up one of his seven rooms so that someone else might live in it (a common occurrence in the early Soviet years, when the flats of the upper classes were seized and converted into communal apartments). The professor dismisses their request, and asks them to take their muddy galoshes off of his expensive carpet. His disdain for the unwashed masses shows the complexity of Bulgakov's story: no one is black and white. The professor, while defending himself against the lunacy of the new communists, is also privileged and snobbish, and, like the communists, convinced of his authority to create a new life.

The scene where the professor turns Sharik into a man is full of comic blood spurts and flying testicles. The humanized dog gives himself the last name Sharikov and gets a job as a cat catcher, "to bring hygiene to the streets of Moscow." He continues to sleep in his dog basket, but dons a grubby suit, finds a girlfriend and pals around with the professor's enemies—the Soviet housing committee. Peter Hoare is wonderful as Sharikov, playing the role with such grotesque physicality that we feel his animal core. He jumps on the table, strums a balalaika and gets a roomful of respected physicians to sing a dirty limerick with him, horrifying the professor. After attempting to rape the maid, he chases a cat around the apartment and demands drink: "I want more f---ing vodka! Give me more f---ing vodka!" he growls.

In one of the most dramatic scenes, the professor seizes his creation and drags him back to the operating table. The floor of the stage tilts up to create a kind of ramp that is quickly covered by a white tarp. When the doctor and his assistants cut Sharikov open, a stream of blood runs down the stage. Later, when the police arrive to investigate reports of Sharikov's murder, they find Sharik the dog walking on all fours. "Talking is not proof of being human," the professor tells the investigators. "The animal is now turning into an animal again."

Write to Jeanne Whalen at