It opens with naked prostitutes and ends with a stripped executioner, a ghoulish severed head and a gore-drenched kinky heroine salivating over her oozing trophy or rolling it around like a football.

The Royal Opera House had warned of nudity and violence in David McVicar's new production of Richard Strauss's Salome. But you would no more go to this 1905 shocker - "operatic offal" as it was called after its controversial premiere - for cosy gentility than you'd look to Oh! Calcutta! for gardening tips.

Based on Wilde's play and the Bible, Herod commands his nubile stepdaughter to dance for him. She in return, bloody-minded teenager that she is, demands the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist), imprisoned in the palace cistern.

There follows a steak tartare moment when she gets her way with the head and all ends nastily. It's an operatic masterpiece but not, you might say, to all tastes.

The British director McVicar, currently on a professional high, has tackled the work with a faultless eye for detail.

He had kept the production, impeccably designed by Es Devlin and urgently, yet sensitively conducted by Philippe Jordan, well under wraps. Rumours of child abuse and similar shocking themes had leaked stickily from the rehearsal room.

In fact these issues were handled with such subtlety that for once this study in profanity seemed almost underdone. Psychological exploration played less importance than the brilliant glamour of Devlin's art deco, Pasolini-inspired sets.

All takes place below stairs in a sullied, peeling white bathhouse-cum-meatsafe complete with hanging pig, a terrible sense of decay about the place. Echoing Steven Berkoff 's celebrated staging of the play, Herod and his tottering dinner guests wear tuxedos or gorgeous Fortuny-style dresses.

Nadja Michael, an experienced, stick-thin Salome, sings with glittering, cool, unvaried assurance and looks stunning if unsexy.

Michael Volle's excellent-ranting Jokanaan is mighty in tone and presence. Michaela Schuster's Herodias, though well sung, is strangely Lady Bracknell-ish. Robin Leggate, a last-minute substitute as Herod, did well in being seedy and louche but Thomas Moser, who was ill, may create a better balance in voice and physique.

This was a fine but not great Salome, with one major miscalculation: the pivotal Dance of the Seven Veils. All you ask here is time off from the horrible events you're witnessing while the orchestra takes over in this splashy showpiece. Salome dances and strips, naked or not, it matters little.

Instead McVicar offered a laborious visual narrative with dolls, zips and swinging light-bulbs.

Michael keeps her clothes on, and even adds a few, then disappears offstage for the climactic last dance, apparently raped by her step father. It leaves a hollow centre to an otherwise intelligent, musically strong production.