Salome at the Curve
The Times
****
****
By Donald Hutera
With its high-flown symbolic language, archly repetitive musical cadences and pulsating undercurrent of erotic decadence, few British directors have been brave enough to tackle Oscar Wilde’s magnetic biblical tragedy. Its engorged lyricism has in the past attracted mavericks such as Lindsay Kemp and Stephen Berkoff. Now comes Jamie Lloyd with a restless co-production between Headlong Theatre and the Curve, Leicester.
Lloyd drags Wilde into the here and now via strong choices that push at the play’s themes and slam into its poetry. Con O’Neill’s stocky, deranged Herod rules a military regime that smacks of the Middle East. Soutra Gilmour’s set is a raised platform of gritty sand, with pools of oil in the corners and lighting rigs surrounding it. The location is dry, dirty and starkly lit (by Jon Clark). The cast wears battle fatigues.
That includes Zawe Ashton’s nubile princess Salome, the spoilt vamp around whom the action pivots. Ashton plays her like a Beyoncé wannabe, vapid and self-absorbed in a one-piece body suit that zips down the front to reveal skimpy golden underwear. What she most craves is Seun Shote’s authoritative Iokanaan — John the Baptist, that is, chained in a cistern. Salome’s attraction to this muscular prophet is not only sexual but something more that she lacks the ability to articulate or to understand. She’s gotta have it, at any cost.
The play is an operatic riff on the destructive potential of desire and power. Headlong’s brutal, wine-soaked performance revels in its moral (and literal) messiness. The leads don’t hold back, plunging into Wilde’s words with almost profligate physicality. O’Neill in particular takes some fabulous risks, playing Herod as a white-faced and dangerous clown whose unpredictable shifts from effete camp to tyrannical rage no one save Jaye Griffiths’s superb Herodias can check or soothe.
Lloyd drags Wilde into the here and now via strong choices that push at the play’s themes and slam into its poetry. Con O’Neill’s stocky, deranged Herod rules a military regime that smacks of the Middle East. Soutra Gilmour’s set is a raised platform of gritty sand, with pools of oil in the corners and lighting rigs surrounding it. The location is dry, dirty and starkly lit (by Jon Clark). The cast wears battle fatigues.
That includes Zawe Ashton’s nubile princess Salome, the spoilt vamp around whom the action pivots. Ashton plays her like a Beyoncé wannabe, vapid and self-absorbed in a one-piece body suit that zips down the front to reveal skimpy golden underwear. What she most craves is Seun Shote’s authoritative Iokanaan — John the Baptist, that is, chained in a cistern. Salome’s attraction to this muscular prophet is not only sexual but something more that she lacks the ability to articulate or to understand. She’s gotta have it, at any cost.
The play is an operatic riff on the destructive potential of desire and power. Headlong’s brutal, wine-soaked performance revels in its moral (and literal) messiness. The leads don’t hold back, plunging into Wilde’s words with almost profligate physicality. O’Neill in particular takes some fabulous risks, playing Herod as a white-faced and dangerous clown whose unpredictable shifts from effete camp to tyrannical rage no one save Jaye Griffiths’s superb Herodias can check or soothe.
