Infuriatingly baffling, mightily pretentious – and perversely gripping
Opera Salome Eno/colosseum ★★★★★
The publicity for this new production of Strauss’s opera describes its perspective as “feminine”, and the pink posters show a waxen version of My Little Pony (a franchise popular with young girls) melting into a puddle.
Don’t be deceived, however, into thinking that Adena Jacobs, the Australian director, is signalling anything cutely prettified: “feminine” is being used here to indicate adherence to a radical feminism concerned with eroticism and violence, and My Little Pony will emerge on stage as a decapitated carcass strung up and eviscerated. So what is going on here?
This is what I saw. The white box that forms the basis of Marg Horwell’s setting evokes a contemporary art gallery. Salome, conventionally enough, is a teenage nymphet – long hair, leggy, sullen.
She is obsessed with the degraded Jokanaan, who struggles out from under a plastic sheet in his underpants and a pair of stilettos. During their encounter, Salome never looks at him: he is a fantasy figure, perhaps not an object of desire at all.
Herod and Herodias swan around in gold lamé, against a backdrop of a head of a blindfolded youth. Salome’s dance is performed solipsistically on an otherwise empty stage.
Herod doesn’t get a look in, and the choreography consists largely of manoeuvres familiar from exercises I execute to ease my sciatica. Towards the climax, Salome retires to recline on the back of her little pony and cheerleader types take over.
Jokanaan’s head is delivered in a plastic bag. Salome slavers over it but never looks inside, and the orgasmic kiss is delivered by Herodias – after which Salome pulls out a revolver and points it into her own mouth. Blackout, phew.
Yet although it is all infuriatingly baffling as well as mightily pretentious, I found it rather gripping in its arid, robotic way.
And if you find it perverse, then what else is Strauss’s music or Wilde’s text? The first-night reception was moderately enthusiastic, but I doubt the show will play out well with ENO’S core audience.
Allison Cook gives a totally committed performance in the title role, keeping her nerve with steely assurance to sing with great skill and security. Michael Colvin and Susan Bickley are adequate as Herod and Herodias, and Stuart Jackson and Clare Presland make something rather beautiful of Narraboth’s dialogue with the page.
The disappointment is David Soar, who sounds uncomfortably stretched by Jokanaan’s admonitions.
The good news is that Martyn Brabbins, ENO’S incoming music director, passes his first major test here with flying colours, providing a firmly paced and richly coloured account of this taxing score.
The orchestra played magnificently – what a fine band it is, just as good as its opposite number at Covent Garden and one of ENO’S priceless assets.