The RSC’S gender-fluid Salomé doesn’t quite cut it

Ever on the lookout to enhance its retail offerings, perhaps the RSC should add to its shop in Stratford (already groaning with Shakespeare-themed trinkets) a 2018 calendar featuring the ensemble’s top 12 hunks.

What with the torso-flaunting Rome season, it’s all got very macho of late. And now, clambering out of a pit, comes the rippling, grimy, scantily clad figure of Gavin Fowler’s John the Baptist in a fresh revival of Oscar Wilde’s verse-drama Salomé.

Is the fact that this follows Yael Farber’s overblown version of the story at the National a coincidence, or culturally significant? I suspect we’re all that bit more interested in the Bible’s most notorious beheading these days.

The sight of “Iokanaan” makes the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas go weak at the knees and spout extravagant, pastiche Old Testament utterances of unrequited adoration. In Owen Horsley’s valiant but variable staging, Salomé is played by a man. It’s one small step for “gender-fluidity”, and it acknowledges that although Wilde wanted Sarah Bernhardt to star in the original (banned) production in 1892, he was expressing forbidden homosexual desire, too.

It’s a bitter blow, all the same, for female equality in casting (the ratio of 15 men to two women is regressive to say the least). It also sidesteps, I think, the crucial issue of vengeful female violence. And, beyond that, Matthew Tennyson’s performance as Salomé lacks the transfixing essentials to justify the eye-catching move.

Tennyson, a descendant of the poet, is certainly pale, scrawny and interesting. Yet how convincing is he as he paces about, delicate in his silvery slip-dress? His delivery is often as flat as his chest; he skimps on wildness, madness, ecstasy. And the dance of the seven veils, that birthdaytreat for Herod with a grisly price-tag, is so jerky-silly, so parodies eroticism, that if I were the Tetrarch (a toobuffoonish Matthew Pidgeon) I’d sue for breach of verbal contract.

To his credit, Tennyson bravely strips completely – adding to the hermaphrodite frisson of this reading – and the closing stages, as he addresses, cradles and kisses a gruesomely realistic replica of Fowler’s bearded face, attain a climactic poignancy.