IT IS an opera company with a difference, working most of the time with community groups, but when Graham Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company stages something big, it likes to confront the big issues. Using opera, you ask? Yes, indeed.

While Wozzeck, Fidelio and Candide, the past productions, clearly deal with themes of deprivation, repression and canting optimism, you wonder what Vick might find to vilify in Monteverdi’s adaptation of the end of The Odyssey: binge drinking? NHS underfunding? Maltreatment of travellers?

Actually, that’s about it: Vick’s Ulysses is a refugee, desperately seeking admittance to Ithaca. Neptune might handily crash his ship on to its shore, but Ulysses still has to face stern Minerva, done up in immigration officer rig and scrutinising his request for asylum. It’s the sort of unexpected metaphor that Vick exploits brilliantly and it works — for a while.

BOC shows take audience involvement to the max. We are processed into the huge space of this ex-ice rink, divided by floor-to-ceiling fencing, with the permanent orgy of Ithaca on one side and us (and the scores of green-card-seeking extras) on the other, indistinguishably mixed. The metaphor is extended with semi-jokey handouts: “Opera should: a) keep its borders closed . . . b) admit all unskilled aliens who will change the artform.”

Vick’s cause is admirable, although it can seem more fun for participants than the audience and he might have chosen a less austere medium than this 1640 opera — more than any other, a play set to music.

In this echoing barn, you often find yourself 50 yards from the current conversation and tracts of the plot were all Greek even to the few opera-adepts who blagged it through security. Purely musical charm is sparse, despite the marvel of Venetian recitative and a lively orchestral performance led by Robert Howarth, permanent continuo flowering into rare jaunty dances.

Yet despite Vick’s less than usually rigorous control of space, there are some intensely dramatic performances: Paul Nilon’s many-shaded Ulysses, Wendy Dawn Thompson an adaptable and forthright Minerva, Adrian Thompson the staunch pig-man-turned- kebab-stall-owner Eumaeus, Emma Selway as Penelope, faithfully waiting these 20 years, half-wishing, half-dreading her husband’s return.

Finally Ulysses is admitted (the audience too, at last allowed to sit after two hours’ milling), deals with Penelope’s pesky suitors and, in a profoundly poignant reconciliation, retreats with her into private space, where we leave them, sitting across a table rediscovering and renewing the human basics whose absence is the heart of Homer and Monteverdi’s conception. He’s home, but we are in no doubt that he, and we, are feeble playthings of gods and their uniformed earthly avatars.