Salome | Victorian Opera
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Date Reviewed: 22/02/2020
Written by Warren Wills
When fact,fiction, mystery and intrigue merge with breathtaking innovation, we are indeed lucky recipients.
The New Testament. is sketchy at best when dealing with Herod and his manipulative, scheming and rather dreadful family. Thus we are indebted to Bulgacov in Master and Margerita, and Gustave Flaubert and Oscar Wilde for providing some tantalizing story telling on a rather lean platter- one, certainly with the freshly severed head of John the Baptist. Thus it was a deliciously debauched and depraved delight to experience the Victorian Opera’s wonderful production of Salome.
“I do not wish him to raise the dead”, proclaims the deranged Herod, played by Ian Storey, fearing, like Nero, and other paranoid tyrants, that the dead will come back to taunt him.
Indeed this epic tale is essentially a four handed tale of debauchery, lust, delusion and power abuse. It is almost an onstage boutique opera. The principal men are insane, one deranged and inspired by faith -John the Baptist,(Jokanaan) performed by Daniel Sumegi and the other, Herod, a paedohile murdering delusional lunatic king, who murders his own brother to marry is sister in law, and then orders his guards to crush his step daughter who he has been druelling and lusting to over. Herod in some of these aspects shares some of the disgust in this portrayal like the seemingly kindly lusting uncle, like Charles Dodgson , (aka Lewis Carrol) leering after his niece Alice in Lindsay Kemp’s seminal Alice in Wonderland. In the same way the Me Too campaign did a hatchet job on Paul Gauguin and his moral excesses,abuses and decadence as a rich French colonialist in Tahiti, the same could be done with Herod in Wilde’s depiction of the deranged King.
Strauss delivers an incessant whirling, cascading, tragic yet triumphalist archetypal Germanic score, dense with a battery of vibrant percussion and a density of brass, in large forces, which the sublime Richard Mills relentlessly marshalled under his fluent stewardship.
Indeed, assembling some giant forces in the Palais pit can be no mean feat, and his moving interpretation of the deeply lyrical and vaguely Middle Eastern exquisite scoring in the Dance of the Seven Veils was a musical highlight.
The direction and staging by Cameron Menzies was done in masquerade Edgar Allen Poe ,mask of red death theatre of the macabre, and the central figures as ghoulish clowns worked a treat, and the nod to androgyne for Salome made modern day sense. Huge congrats to Christina Smith on sets and Anna Cordingley with cossies. The set accommodated the scheming insanity and bloodlust of the characters.
The star of the show, Salome, wonderfully sung by Vida Mikneviciute, gave an incredible,bravura, technical lyrical,emotional masterclass of a vocal performance of the needy, manipulative and scornful protagonist. Strauss demands she powers an endurance effort at the top end of her range throughout. She was ably egged on by the sinister sociopathic monster that is Herodias, played by Liane Keegan. My only criticism was that the staging at the very end was thrown away and the dance of seven veils could have been more seductive. But these are so minor in light of a monumental and magnificent achievement in operatic debauchery. Indeed I havent had so much delight from these characters since the campery of Charlton Heston in the Greatest Story Ever Told.
Congrats to Victoria Opera and Mr Strauss.