Jamie Lloyd’s version of Oscar Wilde’s
biblical drama, which arrives at Hampstead after a tour, bears what has
become the hallmark of co-producer Headlong Theatre: an extreme
re-imagining of a classic text. Here, the original
fin-de-siècle aesthetic of
decadence is replaced by contemporary political, social and moral
decay. New Testament Judaea is presented in Soutra Gilmour’s design as
a dystopia peopled by all races, but since the black sand contains
puddles of crude oil it is probably Middle Eastern. Everyone wears
battle fatigues, including the royal family; Herod here is a petty,
tyrannical warlord, who molests the soldiers of his guard even as he
salaciously eyes his niece and stepdaughter Salome.
The whole family is distracted: Herodias the queen is maddened with
jealousy, and Salome herself has had her head turned (no pun intended)
by a sudden infatuation with the imprisoned prophet Iokanaan. Zawe
Ashton’s Salome is very much aware of the power of her sexuality, but
is still too immature to understand fully how to use it; the dance she
performs for Herod is so deliberate and effortful in its gyrations and
pumpings, as if she is copying the moves she has seen on gangster rap
videos, that the result is almost entirely anerotic as far as the
audience is concerned. But it is not our response that matters, and Con
O’Neill’s Herod is driven almost into a frenzy by it. Jaye Griffiths’
Herodias, meanwhile, looks on in horror until Salome makes her demand
for Iokanaan’s head, when she begins to crow in triumphant approbation
of her daughter’s exploitation of Herod’s promise. Seun Shote’s voice
rings out periodically as the imprisoned prophet, his words and accent
combining to suggest a militant Rastafarian, especially when he
apostrophises Salome as “daughter of Babylon”.
This kind of setting allows performers to provide a welcome bathetic
spin to the sometimes ludicrous poeticism of Wilde’s lines: repeated
remarks about the strangeness of the moon become soldiers’ banter, and
Salome’s rhapsody about the whiteness of Iokanaan’s skin can be
ascribed to the extremity of her amorous delusion. Only by the final
few minutes, when Salome speaks lovingly to the prophet’s severed head,
are we sufficiently prepared to receive Wilde’s tone unmodulated, with
all else silent and still.
Written for the Financial
Times.