Salome: Saved by one commanding performance
Ambiguous telling of The Execution of John the Baptist rescued by lead performance.
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
When we first meet Salome, a princess repulsed by her crude stepfather and his party guests, she is making a break for it: stepping through an airtight door, and into a concrete expanse, as if wandering the gigantic hull of a submarine. At first glance, Irish National Opera’s production seems to be fathoming the depths of Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera.
Certain things may get taken as gospel – the opera is translated from Oscar Wilde’s play version of The Execution of John the Baptist – but there is risk of a blinkered view. Last year, director Bruno Ravella took the vast, airy world of Der Rosenkavalier and impressively made it intimate, allowing lovers to roam undetected through a gigantic version of Vienna. Here, an insistence on metaphor gets in the way quite literally. An elegant leaning tree – the centrepiece of Leslie Travers’s set – will eventually be uprooted, exposing wet, rotten roots underneath, but in the meantime an unrequited love story seems to be playing out, lit only by the small headtorches of soldiers, who regularly disappear from view behind the woody plant.