Shock and revulsion don’t often endure for over a century. Since Strauss’s Salome premiered in 1905, we’ve gradually come around to all manner of once-outrageous ideas, from onstage nudity and performers who stand with their backs to the audience to voting women and same-sex marriage. Yet Salome remains to this day a thrilling, chilling piece, its eponymous antiheroine as disturbing as ever.
David McVicar’s 2008 production – directed in its third revival at the Royal Opera House by Bárbara Lluch – still doesn’t take any chances. McVicar injects extra opportunities for provocation with more nakedness, more hints at sexual violence, a gorily realistic severed head, and lashings of fake blood. This is the stuff of B-movies.
The production’s power, by contrast, lies in its subtler touches. For instance, in the divided spaces of Es Devlin’s austere concrete set (bare lightbulbs, dirty tiles, exposed copper pipes), which places the action in the grim behind-the-scenes of a debauched dinner party. Clad in art-deco bling, the guests are drawn to the backstairs action as enthralled onlookers, lurking silently on stage like so many creepy Aubrey Beardsley figures. Or in Andrew George’s reworking of the Dance of the Seven Veils as a dressing-up fantasy with no nudity and almost no dancing – unsettling and seedy in equal measure.
But what sticks in the mind above all is McVicar’s conception of Salome as a petulant pseudo-teen. She’s a riot of overwrought pouting, wheedling, sulking and foot-stamping. The gap between her mundane histrionics and her extraordinary desires could hardly be larger. In her ROH role debut, Malin Byström was masterful. Making bold use of her voice’s many colours – exhaling and snarling as much as singing – she was almost under-powered at times, only to let rip with astonishing force in her long final monologue.
Michael Volle’s Jokanaan was a genuine match for her, projecting with ease, his voice at once richly textured and hard-edged, his stage presence physically menacing. As Mr and Mrs Tetrarch, John Daszak and Michaela Schuster made a virtue of vocal bluster (Daszak’s voice in particular straining at the top) to embody decay through and through.
Down in the pit, Henrik Nánási managed a slow-burn transition from orchestral sumptuousness (legato über Alles) to a terrifying climax in which bows bit ferociously at strings and the brass seethed and spat. When Strauss’s score sounds as scary as this, blood’n’gore can seem positively tame by comparison.
• At Royal Opera House, London, until 30 January. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
