A Vancouver Opera production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday, May 4. Continues on May 7, 9, and 11

Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul is a strange brew indeed. Overly steeped in metaphor, it’s still a wildly atmospheric adventure in sight and sound.

Visually, the production goes far beyond the sometimes quaint oriental settings of so many Turandots and Madama Butterflys and into a mythical, Asian-inflected fantasy world. Royalty wear garish towering red pagodas, sprawling skeletal trees, and giant lotus flowers on their heads; forests are giant hanging paper banners with abstract calligraphic brush strokes across them. In the staging’s most clever device, a giant central cube opens, like a puzzle box, to a blossom-bedecked staircase.

The aural innovation is even more elaborate. Percussionists drizzle and slap water that sits in glass bowls set asymmetrically at the upper sides of the stage. The chorus rips sheets of paper to create the sounds of a gusty wind through trees. And male monks chant in the rumbling, throaty intonations of Tibetan monasteries. Sometimes a singer’s voice soars into the harsh-to-our-ears sounds of Peking opera, oscillating between half notes. Call it gimmickry if you want; it’s oddly beautiful gimmickry.

This is not a show you come to for its plot, however. It can be hard for western audiences to buy into this philosophical discourse on tea as a spiritual quest. The story focuses on the Japanese prince Seikyo and his search for the mystical Book of Tea with his love, the Chinese princess Lan. But her overprotective brother, the Prince, is willing to fight to the death over—yes—the book.

Tea and the sacred ceremonies around it become the ever-dominating metaphor. The opera opens with Seikyo performing a ritual where he drinks from an empty tea bowl, savouring the void of memory. It’s one of the production’s most mesmerizing scenes, with the orchestra’s sliding strings and baritone ChenYe Yuan feeding the poetry with tormented emotion. But then tea is conjured again in endless cryptic references—even, in the ecstatic second act, as a metaphor for sex. (Yes, the line “Rubbing the oolong the dark dragon rises” prompted a few titters.)

Too stylized to be a showcase for acting, the piece does offer the topnotch singers a chance to display their vocal acrobatics. Faced with her Seikyo and brother engaging in mortal threats, the exquisite Nancy Allen Lundy’s Lan emits a quivering, endless cry of “Noooooooo!” She also ably navigates such Tan quirks as clicking multiple hard consonants at the end of words: “Take your words back-k-k-k!” Yuan brings depth and virtuosity to Seikyo, and Roger Honeywell shows the full, rich range of his tenor.

Props must also go to the male chorus, who must alternately resonate in chants, whisper in astonishment, and manoeuvre through endless challenging runs.

The orchestra, under Jonathan Darlington’s certain hand, scales the treacherous territory of Tan’s music with clarity and Zen-like restraint. This music is, after all, not as melodic and accessible as Tan’s most famous score, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and is more in line with his other, edgy operas.

In the end, not all opera audiences are going to savour this tea; a few people left at intermission. But you have to give credit to VO for being bold enough to offer us a taste of something, well, a lot different than your everyday orange pekoe.