Elektra, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Pageantry and colours go missing in favour of a municipal Mrs Mop

Who said grand opera had nothing to do with mundane reality? Listen to Elektra as she addresses her murdered father's ghost: "Your day will come, the blood from a hundred throats will pour into your grave." Sounds familiar?

Elektra's visions chime perfectly with the language of revenge boiling up in the Middle East.Richard Strauss's short opera is not broken up into acts because it is one long crescendo towards a spectacular piece of cathartic violence.

Directed and designed by Charles Edwards, Covent Garden's new production seems to take place in a municipal courtyard in Mussolini's Italy: the palace servants who introduce the heroine are a dowdy bunch of Mrs Mops. And when Lisa Gasteen makes her appearance as Elektra, she's a Mrs Mop too: her opening aria – which should be a cry of cosmic grief and rage – is delivered in burnished Wagnerian tones – this is no deranged animal whom everyone pities and fears.

Musically speaking, this work – which opens with a wild flurry of tonal dislocation – is an enormous challenge. The conductor, Semyon Bychkov, injects exactly the right febrile urgency, and extracts diamond-bright textures from Strauss's kaleidoscopic score. Vocally, everything turns on contrasting performances by three female characters, each of whom is gripped by a different kind of madness.

Faced by Gasteen's Elektra, Anne Schwanewilms as her younger sister Chrysothemis provides sweet relief: every phrase is felt, and every gesture eloquent. Weighed down with sleepless paranoia, Felicity Palmer's Klytemnestra is vocally superb – magnificently dark at the low end of the register – but she, like Gasteen, fails to breathe life into her part.

When John Tomlinson makes his entrance as the avenging Orestes, he turns out to be in thundering Wotan-mode, so bang goes any further hope of differentiation. The moments that should move us become risible – Elektra's burly efforts to persuade her sister to murder the usurpers, Orestes' comically misplaced concern about Elektra's fragile health – but at just one point, if one shuts one's eyes, the true Straussian magic broke through.

This was the glorious aria in which the heroine sings of the innocence and beauty she lost when she gave herself up to hate, and Gesteen sang it with plangent grace. But one really did have to shut one's eyes: the rich pageantry and lurid colours which Strauss and his librettist specified – and which this work demands – were nowhere to be seen.