Sado-erotic review

The Olivier describes Salomé by Yaël Farber as a ‘new’ play. Not quite. It premièred in Washington a couple of years ago. And I bet Farber was thrilled at the chance to direct this revival at the National’s biggest and best equipped stage. She approaches the Olivier’s effects department like a pyromaniac in a firework factory. She wants everything to go off at once. And it does. Goatherds yodel. Bells bong. Flutes warble. Birds parp. A revolving conveyor belt twirls spare actors around the stage in dizzy circles. Chord surges swell and fade on the soundtrack. Kneeling shepherdesses sift mounds of soap powder into mahogany salad bowls. Overhead, the prog-rock spotlights pick out the figures of Herod and Pilate, both wearing pound-shop kaftans, as they shout bombastic platitudes at each other. A naked unshod dancer spends 20 minutes labouring across the stage in slow motion. Any cast member not involved in a scene has to throw a pose, artfully lit, like an extra from a Titian epic.

It goes on and on. But it goes nowhere. The characters are impenetrable abstractions. Herod stands for rapacity, Salomé for innocence, John the Baptist for righteous defiance. Farber’s lingo is as remote and pompous as a bad Victorian translation of Sophocles. ‘I am she whose hour to speak has come. Too long I have waited,’ says Salomé. The Baptist, who might be a focus of sympathy, rants in Arabic like an outpatient or a hate preacher. His words are translated on a rear screen that is half-obscured by a clunking great ladder, centre-stage. Someone should fix that.

The show’s chief flavour is sado-erotic titillation. Salomé is raped early on. Then she’s stripped naked, very slowly, and carefully bathed and dried. She then puts on a muslin nightie and performs the kind of soft-porn lap dance favoured by online starlets seeking attention from trolls.