BRUSSELS — Possibly the most radical opera production now playing in a major European opera house is Romeo Castellucci’s take — “staging” isn’t the right word — on Gluck’s “Orphée et Eurydice” at La Monnaie here.

To be sure, modern producers deserve a degree of leeway in recreating a work based on an age-old myth, especially one as familiar to opera goers as the Orpheus legend. A lyre player, Orpheus is abetted in his mission to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld by the power of music.

But don’t expect Mr. Castelluci to say anything insightful about this aspect of the opera or, indeed, any aspect of it. An Italian theater director who staged an absorbing but highly controversial “Parsifal” here three years ago, he lifts from the opera but a single idea: that Eurydice — dead but capable of being rescued — lies in a state that in modern terms would be called a coma. Conceivably, this could lead to setting the entire opera in a modern hospital, perhaps with Orpheus desperate to reach Eurydice’s room, and hospital personnel representing the Furies by impeding his way.

But that’s not where Mr. Castellucci, who also designed the décor, costumes and lighting, takes us. Instead he abandons Gluck’s story in favor of a made-up one about a woman named Els, an alter ego of Eurydice who lies in a hospital near Brussels. At first we don’t see her, but her story is projected in text on a blank screen. Otherwise, the stage is practically bare, except for a microphone for Orpheus to sing into as Gluck’s opera unfolds. The stripped-down performance of “Orphée” now underway, we are told, is being broadcast and Els is listening on earphones.