★★★✰✰
Dirt lines the walls of a dingy basement room. Fragments of a decadent dinner party play out in the room above. Who knows what grotesque plans are being hatched among the tuxedo clad guests? All the audience can see are the echoes of violence lingering beneath.
Moral transgression is the focal point for David McVicar’s 2008 production of Strauss’ Salome. Revived once again at the Royal Opera House, it places the 1905 opera in the world of Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. If you have seen the film, you will know that it is a match made in Sadomasochistic heaven, a world where ethical subversion and perversion reign supreme. Perfect for Salome and her amoral antics.
Wilde would no doubt approve. A devout aestheticist who strove to unencumber his art from moral politics, the production never invites the audience to moralise but rather to bask in Malin Byström’s performance as the titular anti-hero. Her voice is silky and youthful, she swans around the basement with supercilious self-importance, but balances a sense of crumbling under the weight of the power she wields over the men around her. She is a walking enigma.
The ensemble accentuate her performance deliciously revolving ritualistically around her like a maypole in a tribal ceremony. From the boisterous John Daszak as a licentious Herod, to the scantily clad maids and scuttling soldiers wriggling gingerly in the background. Jordan Shanahan’s muscular baritone barges through the hedonistic mist as Jokanaan, condemning the corruption around him from the grimy cistern where he is kept prisoner.
Whilst it is a strong production overall, quoting from Passolini’s Salò, wets the appetite for something truly gruesome. Sure, there are the vulgar moments, the psychosexual Dance of the Seven Veils between father and step-daughter is as deliberately uncomfortable as it is well choregraphed, and the beheading of Jokanaan, but they are too polished stylistically to deliver a shocking gut punch.
Perhaps shying away from explicit content is a consequence of championing Wilde’s aestheticism. The moral repugnancy is only implied in Salome’s dance; the sequence is framed by a gorgeous set of sliding doors that give an urgent sexual freneticism thanks to designer Es Devlin (whose work can also be seen in Don Giovanni). But the threat of violence is left to the imagination. The same can be
said for Jokanaan’s beheading by an inexplicably stark-naked executioner. Style is prioritised over substance as he emerges from the cistern covered head to toe in blood.
Maybe the moments are victims of their own infamy. There is a sense in which nothing could quite deliver the expectations that Strauss and Wilde promise on the page or in the music.
Words By Alexander Cohen
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