"We have a giant, singing nose," says The Opera Group's artistic director John Fulljames. "It's a tenor. When it sings, Shostakovich marks in the score, 'To be sung nasally'."

Depicting an exuberant world on the verge of a descent into chaos, Gogol's The Nose is an absurd short story about a man who loses his nose and attempts to recover it.

When Shostakovich set it to music at the tender age of 23, he produced what is commonly considered to be the funniest opera ever written. But as Fulljames observes, there is more to it than that.

"On the one hand, he manages to make the comedy really work - it's an opera at which you belly laugh, which is quite rare," he observes. "But then there are also moments of heartrending pathos, when you really feel for this guy. He's losing his identity, losing his sense of himself."

Sung in English with a cast of nine playing some 70 characters, The Nose centres around a man named Kovalyov, who wakes one morning and discovers that his nose is missing.

At the same time, in another part of St Petersburg, Kovalyov's barber finds the nose in his breakfast roll and, keen to disassociate himself from the incident, throws it into the river.

The surrealism cranking up a notch, Kovalyov spots his nose riding in an elegant carriage and dressing as a high ranking government official, and is devastated when it considers him too lowly to speak to.

And when the police do finally capture the nose a new problem arises: How will Kovalyov reattach it to his face?

"You don't know what's real and what isn't, what's a dream and what isn't," says Fulljames. "Sometimes it suggests that reality and order, these things we base our life on, are actually not very deep, that at any moment chaos could overwhelm us.

"We've set it early in the 20th Century so it's on the cusp of the modern age when in Russian history there was a sense of a revolution, an uprising from below. There's a sense the old order is about to collapse."

First staged to rave reviews in 2001 and now revived in celebration of the Shostakovich centenary, The Opera Group's take on The Nose is highly physical and promises plenty of visual weirdness in the form of giant moons and floating limbs.

"You can tell how young Shostakovich was when he wrote it," says Fulljames. "It's full of really brave experiments, such as a four-minute untuned percussion interlude for ten percussionists.

"There's a sense that there are no rules and anything goes, that the conventions of the past are there to be exploded."

Starts at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £6-£22, call 01273 709709.