A dozen dead bodies strewn across the stage, the city in flames, the heroine fatally gashed by a mask of her murdered father, her mother slain, her brother on a killing spree, her deranged sister in her bridal gown trying to make love to a corpse - you certainly get your money's worth of blood, vengeance, perversion and festering hatred in the 100-minute fortissimo that is Elektra, Richard Strauss's slice of life in the histrionic House of Atreus.

But Strauss and his librettist, Hofmannsthal, were working in Freud's Vienna, not Sophocles's Athens. One strength of Charles Edwards's 2003 Royal Opera production, grippingly revived, is that it locates the tragedy in a surreal, half-and-half world: Elgin Marbles-style frieze on one side of the set, war-wrecked 20th-century Europe on the other. That reminds us not only that Atreus-style dynasties violently tear themselves and their civilisations apart in every era, including our own, but also how much new potency psychoanalysts such as Freud found in Ancient Greek myth. Indeed, the implication here - in the Anglepoise lamp, desk and armchair of a shrink's consulting-room - is that Elektra herself is cunningly playing “psychiatrist” in order to terrify the guilt-stricken Klytamnestra into madness and coerce the suggestible Chrysothemis into joining her vendetta.

The symbolism is clonkingly literal at times: the shadow of the dead Agamemnon really does fall across the action at one point. And there's some clumsy stagecraft. Since Klytemnestra's unfortunate hubby, Aegisth, gets a fresh stab wound from the homicidal Orest each time he goes round in a revolving door, you wonder why he doesn't exit at the first opportunity.

Susan Bullock's Elektra is astonishing - her acting glint-eyed and obsessive, her singing turbo-charged, her stamina immense and her performance as intense as anything I've seen at Covent Garden this year. Nobody else matches that. But Jane Henschel's bloated and grotesque Klytemnestra, Anne Schwanewilms's creepy Chrysothemis - as fixated on her unwanted virginity as Elektra is on her dead father - and Johan Reuter's psychopathic powderkeg of an Orest all contribute to this rollercoaster ride of gathering terror.

In the pit Mark Elder has a fine night shaping Strauss's multifarious textures into a compellingly dramatic subtext, giving the climaxes a properly savage edge but also revelling in the luscious repose of that five-minute patch when Elektra recognises her long-lost brother in a gush of proto-Rosenkavalier tenderness. Then the massacre starts.

Box office: 020-7304 4000, to Nov 24

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