Salomes aren’t being thinly sliced these days; there’s no shortage of them on major stages. Yael Farber’s new version of the para-biblical tale opened at the National Theatre barely a month ago, and now the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford revive Oscar Wilde’s drama (1891; English translation, 1894). Salome, infatuated but spurned by Iokanaan (John the Baptist), exploits the drunken offers of her inappropriately fixated stepfather and uncle, Herod Antipas, to give her any gift if she will dance for him, by demanding Iokanaan’s head.

Wilde’s writing, like Farber’s more politically inclined version, is florid and overblown, as a matter of deliberate choice. The role of the viewer is to decide whether this is the right choice; that of the theatre-makers, to persuade us that it is. It is almost a textbook example of the Queer theatrical aesthetic: flamboyant, at times bathetic but always defiant in its presentation of the gay dimension as deservedly crucial. Yet this particular work is so Queer that it serves as an acid test of such an approach. The humour of ridiculousness is frequent but, I fear, hardly ever intentional; the dialogue, ritually repetitious; the sexuality somehow more explicit for being embodied principally in the symbolic form of Salome’s dance.

Director Owen Horsley takes matters even further by casting a male actor, Matthew Tennyson, as Salome, thus making every aspect of the dynamic gay, and by punctuating the proceedings with anthemic (and also defiantly gay) musical numbers composed by Perfume Genius and sung by Ilan Evans costumed as a fetish queen. It’s relentless. And, despite the efforts of Tennyson, Matthew Pidgeon as Herod and Suzanne Burden as his wife Herodias, it doesn’t overcome regular Wildean plonking of the worst kind. I’m afraid I kept mentally composing parodies. This is a bold attempt to face up to the challenges of Wilde’s material and to carry it even further; however, it doesn’t make its case persuasively, and so the final verdict as to whether or not it is – frankly – bearable is a matter of personal taste. I don’t regret seeing it, but I wouldn’t go back.

Written for the Financial Times.