Dead end

Salome
Royal Opera House

Most popular

Alexander Larman

Beware the middle of Lidl

What is a producer, or, as they more often like to be called these days, director, to do if he is asked to produce/direct a work about which he has no interesting ideas and none comes along during the production process, and the invitation comes from a prestigious ‘centre of excellence’ for which money is no object? Clearly, he teams up with a designer who enjoys putting lots of hardware on the stage and shunting it around, even having it moving rapidly from left to right, making the characters run to keep up, so that the production may easily cost as much as a provincial company would require in a whole year to keep going, had it not recently been axed by the ACE. The trouble with this hardware approach is that opera audiences have got accustomed, and a good thing too, to productions where the scenery, of whatever kind, is suggested or implied rather than plonked before them, and they may find merely distracting a display of affluence which to some extent is used in the service of a work which exposes a society addicted to affluence, as Richard Strauss’s Salome does.