You know that there will be blood at the end of a performance of Strauss’s gory opera. You don’t necessarily realise how much of the stuff will gush over Angela Denoke’s Princess Salome as she hugs the severed head of John the Baptist in David McVicar’s 2008 Royal Opera staging.
McVicar’s designer, Es Devlin — who excels herself in this depiction of grimly 20th-century, concrete-clad horror — actually embarked on medical research when she created this show to establish how much blood really would drip from a head’s severed arteries. So we must take the ensuing torrents as realistic. And, as McVicar establishes, we must also take Salome’s obsession seriously.
On its first outing in 2008 McVicar’s production looked muddled. Back for a second revival and now staged by Barbara Lluch, its central argument seems almost definitive. We are used to thinking of Salome as a nymphette using her sex appeal to get her way. Here it is Herod who has deliberately kept his stepdaughter in a state of vacant childishness. Her celebrated Dance of the Seven Veils, often kitschy, is a descent into her and Herod’s warped history together: years of childhoood abuse played in seven darkened rooms. When Salome spits out “There are not enough dead men!”, you can understand where her rage is coming from.
Denoke’s Salome triumphs more for embodying this vision of corrupted innocence than for her vocal prowess. Though her silvery-tinted soprano has the right timbre, and she uses it to attack the text deftly and intelligently, she’s also often overwhelmed by the orchestra and by the end of the evening her intonation had slipped badly. And yet she is so inside the part that you cannot take your eyes off her. Likewise, the barrel-chested Egils Silins’s Jokanaan, who struggles to project some of the basser notes of his bass-baritone, is a fine study in repression: obviously tempted as Salome runs her fingers down his chest, his refusal to unbend precipitates the tragedy.
There are good cameos in the supporting cast, including Stig Andersen’s greasy Herod, and, particularly, Rosalind Plowright’s raddled Herodias (just on the correct side of camp), but the show is motored by the terrific playing of the orchestra under Andris Nelsons, who reimagines the score not as a shock-filled thriller but as one enormous degraded love song. It’s almost seductive — until the blood starts to drip.
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Box office: 020-7304 4000, to Jun 16