“I suppose I did what all children do: I drew,” the South African artist William Kentridge once said. “All children draw. And I simply forgot to stop.”

That delight – in the power of draughtsmanship, in the sheer energy of putting pen to paper and allowing it to dance – is in full force in Wozzeck, the opera directed by Kentridge which premiered at Salzberg festival last year and is now showing at the Sydney Opera House.

Alban Berg’s score and libretto, completed in 1922 and based on a play by Georg Büchner, follows the troubled, downtrodden anti-hero Wozzeck. In a tragedy, he descends into madness, eventually ending his own life, and the woman he loves.

This version, however, is more art installation than traditional opera. Animated images, rendered in smoky black charcoal, are projected on to the stage. The live singers seem at one with them, stepping out of the sketches, only to sink back in, sometimes disappearing entirely into the landscape.

In a production that highlights the cruel banality of war, there is nothing restful in this bombardment of images. There are destroyed streets, spread-eagle corpses, eerie faces and surreal live footage (one shows a black woman twirling on and off a white man’s lap) all cast over a busy set of wooden steps, stairways and scattered furniture.

As Kentridge put it in a director’s note, which, tellingly, focuses almost entirely on how the opera looks, “I made drawings of landscapes, of blasted buildings, of severed heads, of wounded bodies, of night skies.”

Kentridge attended theatre school in Paris for a year as a young man and had dreams of becoming an actor or film-maker. Over the last decade he has experimented with ever-bigger stage productions, including Dmitri Shostakovich’s absurdist tale The Nose (2010) followed in 2015 by Berg’s Lulu, with both premiering at the Metropolitan in New York.

They were met with critical acclaim and Wozzeck, too, is in many ways startlingly original: to watch it is to gorge on visuals in a way I have never done before. Mirroring Berg’s atonal score (which has none of the melody or anthems of more popular operas), Kentridge provides us with an apocalyptic vision.

Navigating this is a confident cast: Australian-born Michael Honeyman, playing the red-haired Wozzeck, seems to crouch and hunch ever further into his body as he descends into violent hallucinations. Lorina Gore shows his love interest Marie as a flawed woman, hungry for male attention while simultaneously scolding herself for her lax chastity. Then there’s the creepy Doctor, Richard Anderson, whose amoral experiments on Wozzeck seem to feature as a premonition of Nazi medical trials on Jewish prisoners.

But while Kentridge’s own inventiveness and power of imagination imbues every pore of the opera, there is a cost. For all the talent of the cast, they come across more as archetypes than real people, a consequence of putting their development second to the visual theatrics. Take Wozzeck and Marie’s son, portrayed in this case by a macabre wooden puppet (where his face should be, there is simply a gas mask). It’s an image straight out of a horror film. And yet ... he never seems like a real boy or a victim we can sympathise with.

In the midst of writing Wozzeck, as the first world war broke out, Berg was sent to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army. His experiences there – of myriad untold horrors – formed his magnum opus. “There is a bit of me in his character,” he wrote to his wife in 1918, “since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact humiliated.”

To Kentridge’s credit, his Wozzeck, too, reeks of humiliation. Here is a weak man, abused by higher-ups, beaten down by poverty and battered by war. Ultimately, it’s a draining, tense, damning view of the world. Still, watching the opera unfold, it is hard not to luxuriate in Kentridge’s artistry. In the beauty of his drawings.

• Wozzeck, a co-production between Salzburg festival, the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Australia and the Canadian Opera Company, is playing at the Sydney Opera House from 30 January to 15 February 2019