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Sunday 7 September 2008

Dead end

Salome
Royal Opera House

Salome
Royal Opera House

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.

At the Royal Opera, David McVicar, working with designer Es Devlin, has mounted a production of Salome which, like the same house’s Ariadne auf Naxos, is two-tiered. Upstairs, a load of seedy toffs in evening wear — we’re in the 1920s — are having a meal; downstairs — much the larger proportion of the space — we see something between a kitchen and a bath-house, vaguely reminiscent of de Chirico. A naked woman is taking a shower as the curtain rises, and doesn’t get dressed for some time, though she has no part to play in the action. The besotted Narraboth, captain of the guard, reels on the spiral staircase connecting the two levels, exclaiming about Salome’s beauty while everyone ignores him, and killing himself with a flick-knife when Salome tries to kiss Jokanaan. Salome naturally has lots of chances to slink up and down the staircase, and whatever one may feel about Nadja Michael’s performance of the title role, she does slink well. The object of her passion is suitably disgusting, too, for the purposes of the drama.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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