Olivia Fuchs's new staging of Verdi's Macbeth for Opera Holland Park may best be described as an amalgam of theatre of cruelty, agitprop and feminism. A study in stylised violence, its antecedents include Peter Brook's notorious production of Weiss's Marat/Sade and Götz Friedrich's equally notorious film of Strauss's Elektra.

The dominant images are blood and water that pour down the walls of Bob Bailey's set and slosh in runnels in the floor. A vat of gore is hauled round the stage, its contents covering bodies and staining clothes. Fuchs draws on the libretto's reiterated demands that Duncan's murderers be branded with the mark of Cain; but by the end, everyone has the requisite bloody thumbprint on his or her forehead. The Macbeths - Olafur Sigurdarson and Miriam Murphy - are symptomatic of political dysfunction not its cause. We are all, Fuchs argues, complicit in self-perpetuating chains of violence.

Within this human abattoir, Sigurdarson and Murphy play a deadly game that is as much about sex as it is about power. They get off on bloodletting, voraciously pawing each other before each murder. Sigurdarson sings with a veneer of elegance, suggesting a man whose last vestiges of nobility are imploding under the influence of uncontrollable forces, both psychological and external. Murphy showers him with decibels and scorn, before sliding towards an unnerving childlike singsong in the sleepwalking scene.

There are flaws. Fuchs, imposing her own agenda, sees witchcraft as a projection of male fears about dominant female sexuality, which may be true to life but is not necessarily true to Verdi. The conductor, John Gibbons, takes a while to settle into the score, not generating the requisite sense of menace until partway through the first act. The best of it, however, is at once supremely intelligent and nerve shredding. See it, if you think your stomach can take it.

· Until June 24. Box office: 0845 230 9769