Excellence amid the gore

Salome
Royal Opera House

Die Meistersinger
Welsh National Opera on tour, Birmingham

Richard Strauss’s Salome is no joke for its director, however much it may be for the audience. When David McVicar mounted it at the Royal Opera in 2008, the production, together with the cluttered designs of Es Devlin, seemed to have as its main object to keep the eye occupied while the mind wondered and probably wandered. Scenes reminiscent of Pasolini’s Salò, not a movie I was happy to be reminded of, and one that has no connection I can see with Strauss (stills from it continue to illustrate the programme), were enacted down below, while at the very top of the stage a lavish Edwardian dinner was in full guzzle, and the heroine rushed up and down a connecting staircase to no purpose. That has mostly gone, though the set and the dinner party remain.

Otherwise, it is a pretty routine production, except for the non-dance of the veils; and nudity is to be found not with Salome, who wears a white dress or shift throughout, but with the executioner of John the Baptist, who disrobes to carry out his task, and sits moodily through the last scene until, on Herod’s order ‘Kill that woman!’, he turns and rapes Salome to death. Jokanaan’s head remains in fairly good shape throughout its lengthy ordeal of being sucked and licked by Salome, but one way and another the executioner and the heroine manage to get soaked in red paint. It seems as if Justin Way, the revival director, has given up on the work, or at least on giving a distinctive slant to it, and that does seem a good idea, though anyone who wanted to take it seriously in some way might disagree.