Salome

by Richard Strauss (libretto based on Oscar Wilde's play)

seen at the Coliseum on 3rd October 2018

Adena Jacobs directs ENO's new production of Salome, designed by Marg Horwell and conducted by Martyn Brabbins, with Allison Cook as Salome, David Soar as Jokanaan, Michael Colvin as Herod and Susan Bickley as Herodias.

ENO's 2018/19 season proposes to 'explore and examine some of the patriarchal structures, relationships, and roles of masculinity within our society'. Adena Jacobs' theatre work 'is celebrated for its questioning of conventional patriarchal attitudes as she reframes mythic stories through a lens that is radical, contemporary and feminine'. (Both quotations are from Artistic Director Daniel Kramer's welcome note in the programme.)

Whether Strauss's opera can be so 'reframed' is perhaps open to question. The clash between Salome and Jokanaan is stark and unrelenting; she is intoxicated by his charisma while he is utterly impervious to hers. The clash between Salome and Herod is powerful in a different way: he is besotted with her and she is scornful of him, but well able to use the power his lechery gives her to gain what she desires. While it may be easy to regard Salome as merely a female temptress, it's fairly clear that her obsessions and recklessness drive the opera, and while her final soliloquy may be grotesque and distasteful, it is nonetheless extremely powerful.

This production opens in a black space with a few guards clustered near the centre of the stage, and a tank full of cloudy water and a naked body moving about in it (hardly swimming, as the tank is not particularly large). When, however, Salome demands to see the prophet, it is not at all clear that he is the one in the tank; he is revealed quite dry and supine under a vast sheet. Has she descended to see him, or has he indeed been brought up out of the cistern? In this production it is impossible to tell, as the locations are not physically specific. Jokanaan's pronouncements while still in the cistern are aurally diffuse, severely impairing their effectiveness; he sounds better when actually on stage. However, despite the fact that he is described by one of the guards as young, and that Salome rhapsodises about his glorious black hair and his seductively pale skin, he appears grey-haired and fairly unprepossessing. Incarceration may well have taken the sheen off him, but surely Salome is not so deluded that she cannot see what is in front of her.

After Narraboth's suicide, which leaves a repellent pink puddle on the floor for Herod to start away from (and later, weirdly, to roll in), a large decapitated pink horse is dragged in, and its entrails as flowers are pulled out from its slit belly. Striking, but also rather needlessly peculiar. No-one on stage seems to find it odd to be sharing it with this carcass. We are perhaps in a dreamscape.

The famous 'dance of the seven veils' is inevitably problematic in a feminist reading, since it so blatantly appeals to the male gaze, and serves to underscore the fact that Salome can only act in a way that will please and titillate the man in power. The collusion of the audience in voyeurism is hard to resist if an orientalised - or indeed any other - seductive dance is attempted, especially as the music demands abandonment. The solution here is to defuse the eroticism by barely having a dance at all; Salome moves around occasionally adopting poses fit for a (sub-)pornographic photo shoot, and is eventually aided by four silent girls making perfunctory sexualised gestures on the floor or about the neck of the trussed up horse carcass. The contrast between what we hear and what we see perhaps legitimately questions patriarchy, but it does so at the expense of defusing the dramatic tension.

More interesting, perhaps, is the relationship between Herodias and Salome, mother and daughter, which is hardly one of solidarity. Herodias, at first jealous and suspicious of her daughter, is delighted at Salome's request for Jokanaan's death, but when she refuses Herod's order to return to the palace after the execution, preferring to be with her daughter, she does so in order to move towards the infatuated girl. Her embrace, though, is anything but supportive: instead she slowly places a pistol into her daughter's mouth. But it is not clear whether Herodias's or Salome's own fingers will pull the trigger to preempt Herod's order to 'kill that woman', or whether neither will act; there is no time to find out before the final blackout.

The singing is fine, but both Allison Cook and David Soar were at times underpowered, so that Jokanaan's oracular style fell short of the noble orchestral tones accompanying him, and Salome was not always sufficiently passionate to unleash the full power of her role. In contrast to the tightly coiled spring of David McVicar's production at Covent Garden (reviewed in January this year), the tension here was unfortunately dissipated at crucial points.