Coinciding helpfully with the paperback release of John Bridcut's excellent Britten's Children (Faber, £9.99), ENO's new Death in Venice is a headlong plunge into the sexual and emotional turmoil of Benjamin Britten and his part-romantic, part-nostalgic predilection for the younger generation. Though, of course, that's not quite how the show's being billed.

Thomas Mann's novella follows the progress of author Gustav von Aschenbach (played here by Ian Bostridge) from writer's block to the finding of a muse - the Polish boy, Tadzio (Benjamin Paul Griffiths) - and thence through Aschenbach's agonised introspection to his death from cholera (sorry, but the title should have been a hint).

Alas, the opera is like second-rate Oscar Wilde, and with the added irritant of a musical avant-gardism that Wilde would never have tolerated. Call me reactionary, but I derive no pleasure from what the programme-notes refer to as "independent melodic strands" (that is, the strings and the brass playing in completely different keys). I get it - it's indicative of emotional tension, loss of control, choleric decay and so forth. It's just not much fun to listen to.

Though impeccably produced by Deborah Warner - in fetching shades of black and white - the drama is less than gripping because it's almost a one-man show. Though this gives Bostridge plenty of opportunity to show off his haunting voice (he is in every way suited to the part), it does make the theatrical side of things rather dependent on his gangly angst. The only other notables are Peter Coleman-Wright (seven roles, including the Voice of Dionysus) and Iestyn Davies, who provides the Voice of Apollo.

It is through the tussle between Apollo and Dionysus, of course, that the big question is being asked. What is one supposed to do with one's potentially destructive desires: act on them, or shroud them in poetry? In this, Mann's novella has been rather disingenuously cleaned up. Suggestions of Tadzio's complicity in the non-affair have been removed, and there are none of the physical allusions to his corruption (a kind of inverse Dorian Gray) found in the original.

Furthermore, because the boys' are all professional dancers (unusually for Britten, there is no chorister role here), the physical and moral implications of the opera are very different from Mann's real-life experience, which featured an 11-year-old Tadzio.

I confess I just found the adolescent' athletics too annoying. The dancers seem to have forgotten what childhood was like, and re-learned their boyish swagger' from George Formby movies. Tadzio's dance-fight looked it had been choreographed by Will Ferrell, in homage to the fire-side scene from Women In Love.

So unless you're an ardent fan of Britten, give this one a miss. If it's Venice and psycho-sexual tension you're after, rent The Talented Mr Ripley.

There are further performances of Death in Venice tomorrow and Wednesday. Box office : 0870 1450200 (www.eno.org).