Edinburgh — When Aeneas set out from defeated Troy to found a greater city beyond the seas, he was embarking on an adventure equivalent, or so the Wooster group’s “La Didone” suggests, to those of the Cold War astronauts, who left this planet in the hope of finding a better world elsewhere.

This show is a witty blend of baroque opera and mid-20th-century sci-fi, in which armor morphs easily into space suits, in which parallel texts parody each other to hilarious effect, and in which the stylized body language of a tenor striking a pose for his big aria mimics the slow-motion prancing of a weightless space voyager.

Francesco Cavalli’s version of the story of dido and Aeneas, first performed in Venice in 1641, and the 1965 film, “Planet of the Vampires,” each describe a mission interrupted when the heroic explorer encounters representatives of an alien culture intent on possessing him and deflecting him from his destiny. The two narratives, which are played out simultaneously on stage, are close enough to generate a sequence of excellent ironic jokes, as well as a shimmer of mutually transferred meaning.

From a 21st-century perspective, both of this show’s sources are equally mannered and equally quaint. But here they are fused into something fluently inventive and ultra-modern. The costumes, by Antonia Belt, are steel colored and satin-sheened, ruffed like 17th-century court dress, articulated like armor but lavishly outfitted with the 20th century’s great contribution to garment construction: the zipper. Gorgeously stylish hybrids, they nicely epitomize the way “La Didone” plays with its source material.

The stories open simultaneously with storms — one mellifluously announced by the god Aeolus, the other represented by a blizzard of electronic sound and flashing video images. Everyone is talking about heroism and human frailty in the face of the great forces of nature, but half the characters are standing still to do so musically and at great length, employing elaborate verbal constructions and balletic arm gestures.

Meanwhile, the other actors stride about fiddling with consoles and video screens and barking laconic instructions relating to bits of hardware. The cogs projected on to the overhead screens allude both to the Wheel of Fortune about which Aeneas sings and the spaceship’s whirring machinery. The dramatically staged boar hunt during which dido and Aeneas consummate their passion tangles with a ray gun battle in outer space.

There’s a motif running through both plots — that of rejection. The spaceship comes to grief because of the failure of a gadget called a “meteor-rejecter,” and Aeneas proves his manly, proto-roman virtue by rejecting an alien temptress. but by choosing this particular opera, Wooster’s director Elizabeth LeCompte twists the moral. Cavalli adapted Virgil to give his audience a happy ending: his dido ends not on a funeral pyre, but in a traditional marriage. roused from her exaggerated mourning by her Trojan lover, dido puts him behind her and accepts her original suitor, King Iarbas. The unnecessary foreigner here is not the lovesick queen but the restless warrior. And the beings who set off at the end of the sci-fi narrative to construct a new civilization are not earthlings but aliens. it’s a nice reversal of traditions both ancient and modern, and a witty conclusion to a show that is constantly surprising both to the eye and the ear.

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The updating of early opera has been a theme of this year’s Edinburgh international Festival. The Wooster group substitutes hi-tech gizmos for the stage machinery that provided special effects in 17th-century theater: in their production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” Gilbert Deflo and conductor Jordi Savall have reverted to the clumsy but ravishingly real thing. The music is italian and the music director Catalan, but the look is French. The backdrops depict gold-hazed landscapes after Claude Lorrain. The chorus, ring-dancing in neoclassical pleated tunics, could have stepped out of a painting by Poussin and the flat, shamelessly artificial clouds, chariots, and painted horses winched down out of the sky all look as if they were borrowed from the prop-store at Versailles.

There’s nothing clumsy about the illusions generated by the Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu. Employing projected film and live dancers with such exact synchronicity that it is difficult and always irrelevant to ascertain which is which, they create moving images to the accompaniment of Rameau’s exquisitely refined ballet music, interspersed with the equally tight rhythms of hiphop. The color is brilliant — sky blue, flowery pinks and yellows. The mood is playful, the atmosphere voluptuous. Stylistically anything goes: break dancing, ballet, and acrobatics.

The theme is zoological. This is a carnival of animals. Filmed elephants walk real tightropes. real dancers drop to all fours and lope off as filmed lions. Scale fluctuates. Chickens tower over horses. A peacock opens its tail to engulf an entire back wall. The setting, insofar as there is an identifiable one, is a formal garden, decorated with topiary and white marble statues liable to sudden, elegantly obscene distortions.

There is no narrative, no logic, no attempt to explain why these Ancien régime aristocrats are disporting themselves on a trampoline or why that contortionist is partnering a human-size frog: They are simply a sequence of joyfully libertine dream images. The only plodding passages are those in which a clownish character holds still and speaks to us. “Dansons!,” reads rameau’s frequent stage direction. So long as this company obeys it, they create a spectacle as extravagant as it is delightful.

Ms. Hughes-Hallett is the author of “Heroes: A History of Hero-Worship” (Knopf). Her coverage of the Edinburgh International Festival will continue this week.