Published: 01 July 2010
by HOWARD LOXTON

THIS is the familiar biblical story of Salome, step-daughter of King Herod Antipas who was promised anything she wanted if she would dance for him and she asked for the head of John the Baptist

Director Jamie Lloyd, in this Headlong Theatre  production, has made his own version which ignores the lush, decadent opulence of Oscar Wilde’s script to give us something dark and gritty. It is strikingly theatrical and acted to the hilt but I am at a loss to understand what point he is making.

As the audience enters, dark figures flit cross the stage. A raised platform is surrounded by a metal grid pathway and below it a surface of what looks like coal. Is this going to be ninjas in a coalmine, was my first thought – but it isn’t. This is the Middle East of course, Judea, and if you want contemporary relevance it’s oil, not coal, that everyone is after and indeed there do appear to be pools of dirty oil in corners of the set. Are the scaffolds, gantries, puffs of steam and the serried ranks of spotlights intended to suggest a drilling station? In better light the figures turn out to be soldiers in dirty battle fatigues, watching their betters at an offstage banquet, poetically admiring the whiteness of Princess Salome and of the moon. 

The royals are no better dressed. When Salome herself appears, taunting the soldiers to bring up prophet Iokanaan (the Baptist) from his dungeon, she has similar dirty fatigues over her underwear. 

With colour-blind casting, it doesn’t matter that her dusky skin ill-matches her description and when she comments on the paleness of Seun Shote’s powerful, shiningly black Iokanaan it could be deliberately ironic, though is not played so. Yet despite his virility and her provoc­ative body fingering, they are both, like the moon, strangely virginal. 

Her eroticism is an imitation, not truly sensual even in her notorious dance. How, one wonders does Con O’Neill’s shrill, masturbating Herod maintain authority over these soldiers clearly under stress. Vyelle Croom’s charismatic, dreadlocked Naaman could easily lead a challenge. 

Excitingly theatrical, this becomes a tale about a psychotic chieftain in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic world. But references to Rome and contractions between text and action make this treatment difficult to swallow – despite the intensity which the whole cast give it. 

Until July 17

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