NINETY years on, Richard Strause's setting of Wilde's Salome still has the power to shock.

Even David Loveaux's morose production, which shows Herod living in sorely reduced circumstances, cannot rob the score of its relentless, sick vitality, but it is hard to imagine any white peacocks worthy of the name strutting around the half ruined tower that dominates the stage with hazardous steps and ladders for singers to risk their lives on harder still to fathom the significance of a shirt draped across its upper reaches the household washing hanging out to dry?

Vicki Mortimer's concept suggests a great house down on its luck, though the Tetrach family can still afford rich clothes and a decent table. There is piquant contrast in the spectacle of the poorly dressed Nazarenes waiting outside the palace for news of the Baptist while within Kristine Ciesinski expresses Salome's discontent and nascent passion with strong commitment and complete mastery of the steps and ladders.

But the essential seductiveness of the famous dance is tossed to the winds by choreography of unsightly jerkiness without a single veil to be shed. An overcoat comes off, and a long, winding sash, butt nothing else.

There is an impressive Herod from Alan Woodrow, all petty rage and guilty jitters, and from Sally Burgess a ravishing and thoroughly wanton Herodias. Robert Hayward exercises big, ringing tone in the part of Jokanaan, while John Marsden and the Dublin mezzo, Ethna Robinson, make (the most of their roles as Narraboth and the sad young page. Andrew Litton conducts.