Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome.
A blonde, blank-faced Barbie doll in gym knickers, vest and shiny trainers stands in a spotlight, a baseball bat in her hands. Strauss’s oboe begins its suggestive arabesques but Salome remains quite still, her eyes fixed impassive, unblinking on the audience. Eventually her hips begin to twitch, her back arches and she goes sullenly through the motions of sensuality, never breaking her gaze, defying us to find her desirable. A squad of identical nymphets join her, their provocative movements calisthenic, robotic — a seduction routine choreographed for the Hitler Youth. It’s kinky, queasy and utterly compelling — a male fantasy seen through female eyes, a fully clothed striptease that leaves its onlookers naked and exposed.
Taylor Swift; the Chapman brothers; Suicide Squad; Nicki Minaj; Lolita; Berlinde De Bruyckere: the references just keep coming. Australian director Adena Jacobs’s new Salome for English National Opera is a mess — a ragbag of undigested images, identities and ideas, a jigsaw puzzle without a solution, a collage of chaotic visuals. It’s not coherent, but how many teenage girls are? Especially ones lusted over by their stepfather and neglected by their narcissist mother.
This 21st-century Salome tries to tell her story using only what society and a screwed-up family have given her, a traumatised child trying to show us where he touched her using only a doll and a bright pink crayon. With no adult language of her own, she takes the toys and tropes of childhood, bends, brutalises and twists them into newly disturbing shapes.
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