Opera - Peter Conrad enjoys a stingingly up-to-date satire marking Poland's admission to the EU

In Poland, parcelled up between Russia, Prussia and Austria from 1772 to 1914, patriotism was a love that dared not speak its name. At least it could not do so in words; music, however, made a more elliptical protest against oppression. The liltingly insidious dance rhythms in Stanislaw Moniuszko's The Haunted Manor - performed by Polish National Opera during its visit to Sadler's Wells last month - tweak the political conscience of two decommissioned soldiers. After two performances in 1865, it was banned for 50 years by the Russian censors.

The responsibility of resistance devolves on an ineffectual prince in Krzysztof Penderecki's Ubu Rex, the highlight of the Sadler's Wells visit. The Polish king is murdered at a military parade by the oafish upstart Ubu and his lewd wife. They then gobble up the country's wealth; the widowed queen exhorts her wimpish son never to renounce his claim to the throne, but he wanders off and never reappears. Penderecki's opera premiered in Munich in 1991, after the Russian empire had fallen apart. Nevertheless, this fatalistic farce assumes that Poland's problems are insoluble, and jokes about the musical consolation in which Moniuszko so fervently believed.

The score is a grab bag of jeering allusions. It begins and ends with a quotation from the sailors' chorus in Wagner's Flying Dutchman. The Dutchman restlessly voyages in quest of redemption; Ubu and his gang, routed by the Russians, flee Poland and travel towards one of the safe havens that the international community offers to deposed dictators. An ensemble in which the hero and his attendant thugs conspire over a greasy feast of tripe, tapioca, ducks' rumps and bulls' balls recalls the exhibition of gluttony in Kurt Weill's Mahagonny, but again there is a difference. Weill's gormandiser eats himself to death: Ubu belches, farts, loosens his belt, and swaggers off to commit further gross excesses.

Music, for these naked apes, is the sound of a crass or fatuous insensitivity. Mother Ubu (magnificently performed by Anna Lubanska) delivers an aria that is a wordless and therefore meaningless rhapsody. Her husband (Pawel Wunder) ignores her vocal virtuosity and watches football on television. Penderecki separates unstable Poland from ritualised Russia in a style that pays solemn homage to Mussorgsky. Even battle, despite a mocking quotation from the trumpet reveilles in Prokofiev's War and Peace, offers no chance for heroic redress. The showdown between the two countries involves an exchange of paper darts, bog rolls and politically incorrect epithets. The only army on view is a contingent of muscular stagehands who vault through a Soviet-style gymnastic display while the orchestra (conducted with ferocious vigour by Jacek Kaspszyk) fires off unavailing cannonades.

Penderecki's source is Alfred Jarry's surrealist puppet play Ubu Roi, which rejoices in expletives and primitive marauding. Jarry claimed that the non-sensical piece had no connection with Poland, arguing that it was set "nowhere at all". A recent translator suggests that he had in mind "a particularly phallic kind of sausage" that the French call "pologne", and therefore renames Ubu's realm Balo-neyland. The relevance of the fable for Penderecki is clear; he uses a play written in 1896 as a prophetic announcement of his country's history in the 20th century.

Since the opera's first performance, a series of superimposed translations has brought it stingingly up to date. Anna Kaspszyk, the conductor's wife, has made a slangy English version of the text for a CD recording of Ubu Rex, and cleverly adapts the hero to the politics of the media age: he now operates a "spin machine" that macerates the brains of his subjects, while his wife, wheeling a shopping trolley over the tundra after her downfall, chuckles that she has "stitched up" the ogre "on all those pension funds". Ubu kills the king, according to the translator, so he can introduce "a free-market economy". The Sadler's Wells visit was organised to mark Poland's admission to the European Union, with sponsorship from mining, oil and gas companies, and the equine patronage of the Duke of Kent. How apt that Ubu Rex celebrates financial rapacity!

Although Polish National Opera still performs Ubu Rex in the original German, the librettist Jerzy Jarocki has translated his own text back into Polish, sharpening its satire in the process. Jarry's Ubu created a scandal in 1896 with the first word he used when roused from hoggish sleep. "Merdre!" he shouted: the pun is translated into German as "Schreisse!" and into English as "Shrit!" Such scatology no longer has the power to offend; in contemporary Poland, there is another candidate for dirtiest word in the language. In Munich, Ubu defied the tsar by yelling, "Tartar!" Now that Jarocki has restored the character's native tongue, Ubu denounces his enemy as "Komunista!" Or - given that Krzysztof Warlikowski's production ends with the Statue of Liberty brandishing her club-like torch as the dethroned despot arrives in New York - should that defamatory term perhaps be "Amerikanski"?

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