SALOME
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But censors halted the production during rehearsals because of its sexual outspokenness and blasphemous depiction of a Bible story. When the script was published, a reviewer from the Times of London called it “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.” Salome finally premiered in France in 1896, with Bernhardt in the title role (the recently imprisoned playwright never saw it). Max Reinhardt staged it in Germany in 1902; but it was banned in England even for private performance until 1905, the year in which Richard Strauss transformed it into the libretto of his opera. The English version (translated by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover) was not performed in public until 1930.
This pillorying seems odd: the plot follows the Bible’s simple, ugly story, and little in Salome is more salacious than the verse in the Song of Solomon. Salome is a princess loved too well by her stepfather, Herod Antipas. Feeling cursed by his childless marriage to Herodias, Salome’s mother, Herod has succumbed to a general sybaritic indulgence, and smitten by his stepdaughter, agrees to grant her anything if she performs the right dance with the correct veils.
Whether it’s intentional or not, Andrew J. Dahlman’s set resembles a large, gray padded cell. You keep waiting for a shrink to enter and halt the patients’ psychodrama.
