the moon in Hampstead

Salomé, Gustave Moreau, 1876

I missed the full moon on Friday, but a pale gold disc hovered suggestively in the skies all weekend. It rose, a sliver off full, like a mythic experience over the rooftops of Fitzrovia on Thursday night; in fact, it hit my eye like a big pizza pie over a Greek meal. It looked jolly impressive even last night from the kitchen window, after a long, hot afternoon’s tramping by the Regents Canal. And it had risen, only just waning, above the rooftops of Hampstead on Saturday, looking like a cool, peaceful piece of money – right after a performance of Oscar Wilde’s moon-driven symbolist confabulation, Salomé.

Now, it is a wonderful thing to see Salomé performed. It’s more, if I’m not mistaken, than Oscar ever did. It was banned by the censors when he wrote it in 1891 (because of showing Biblical characters on stage, not because of the content, though indeed the censor called it in a private letter “almost pornographic”). Wilde wrote the play in French, and it was translated into English (badly) by Lord Alfred Douglas, and fixed up again by the author; Douglas merely gets the credit. The premier performance was in less shockable Paris, in 1896, while Wilde was in prison (and incidentally, Arthur Symonds and Ernest Dowson went together to see it and support their friend). Since then, you know – eclipsed (heh heh) by Earnest, made into a rich & strange opera by Strauss, and kept in a drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, as a favourite period piece for a century…

… so, this current production has been touring around and is at the Hampstead Theatre until July 17. Directed by Jamie Lloyd, in association with Headlong Theatre, it represents a “re-imagining” of the text. Wonderful. Basically, that is what Headlong Theatre does. “Re-imagines” the classics. It’s “young,” – it’s “relevant” – and it’s probably the only way fusty Decadent old Salomé, like a past-it doyenne of some moth-eaten Soho pub, could have got onto the 2010 stage.

The production basically turns the text inside out: a multi-racial cast reads lines about the whiteness of people’s hands, bodies; the young soldier of Syria, who should be shy and pensive, is instead hyperactive and full of rock-&-roll jitters for the princess; Salomé’s mother Herodias is as bad as the king himself. The stage directions take the play in completely new directions, with Herod “molesting” (as on review coyly put it) the soldiers, even while letching after his step-daughter, in his wife’s presence. He is played as a drunken housing estate football hooligan of a Tetrarch. The cast are all in army camouflage (no fear though, Salomé unzips her cute little boiler suit to reveal a gold bra). The whole thing is staged on a set made of tar, pitch and crude oil.

Opinions were divided among my party as to whether it was quite as bad as all this sounds.

I said it was surprisingly interesting, and drew unexpected connections out of Wilde’s text – casting its moonlight on hypersexualised teenagers, dysfunctional families – modern social breakdown, in fact, rather than wafting symbolism… (but that’s our trope these days. Theatre, like fiction, as journalism). As a statement on religious warfare, though, which (with the multiculturalism of the cast of soldiers from all around the Roman Empire, and the oil, and John the Baptist’s speeches, and whatnot) you might have expected it to be, it was less successful. But then, Wilde wasn’t really talking about that.

The set’s great, and full points for verisimilitude: the smell of pitch was even a teensy bit nauseating.

The shoutiness was annoying, but there were a couple of fabulous  performances. Sam Donovan as the Syrian soldier, with his “when’s-my-next-fix” twitches and jumpy obsessiveness, showed an uncanny ability to turn maunderings about doves and butterflies into lecherous soldier’s talk. Zawe Ashton completely believably turned Salomé into a spoilt girl getting attention in the way she’s learned from MTV (and her dysfunctional parents) without any idea of the power of the fire she’s playing with. In the final scene, with John the Baptist’s head, she plays Salome’s (disembodied)  lust very believably as emotional derangement born of abuse. (Her performance also made me realise the extent to which – surprise, surprise – the text can  operate as a treatise on forbidden desire, indeed on homosexuality in the old illegal days… in fact, on Wilde’s fears of the very kind of disastrous playing-out that came to pass a few years later. Surprising I never saw this before – I’d have to reread the play to see how much is in there and how much of that came from the turn-it-on-its-head staging.)

The other party of my party, however, took a different line. He says everybody is utterly sick of this sub-Alien 3 dystopian stuff, we’ve seen it all before, it’s a stupid, tired gimmick and just goes to show how theatre nowadays has to earn its keep by pretending to be TV. (It was confirmed for me, while my mal-disant companion was at the bar, that the director did in fact cite Alien 3 as a style source for the cast, but I kept that news to myself.) The words “cynical” and “jaded” were bandied about. The argument is incontrovertible; but maybe I’m protected: I’ve never seen any of the Mad Max films, Alien 3 or anything else like that.

Also, and this will sound lame, I just felt a real thrill, hearing Oscar’s words spoken live…

One final note. This staging was to me quite shocking. And it strikes me that, what Wilde actually wrote having lost its power to shock, this did at least afford a modern audience that experience. I found myself too stunned at the end to clap immediately – I wanted a minute to take it in -and I’m told this has been the trend in the run of this production.

And so, under a looming moon, we watched this ironic Salomé…

“Que c’est bon de voir la lune!  Elle ressemble à une petite pièce de monnaie.  On dirait une toute petite fleur d’argent.  Elle est froide et chaste, la lune . . . Je suis sûre qu’elle est vierge.  Elle a la beauté d’une vierge . . . Oui, elle est vierge.  Elle ne s’est jamais souillée.  Elle ne s’est jamais donnée aux hommes, comme les autres Déesses.”

Advertisement