Dead end
Michael Tanner
Salome
Royal Opera House What is a producer, or, as they more often like to be called these days, director, to do if he is asked to produce/direct a work about which he has no interesting ideas and none comes along during the production process, and the invitation comes from a prestigious ‘centre of excellence’ for which money is no object? Clearly, he teams up with a designer who enjoys putting lots of hardware on the stage and shunting it around, even having it moving rapidly from left to right, making the characters run to keep up, so that the production may easily cost as much as a provincial company would require in a whole year to keep going, had it not recently been axed by the ACE. The trouble with this hardware approach is that opera audiences have got accustomed, and a good thing too, to productions where the scenery, of whatever kind, is suggested or implied rather than plonked before them, and they may find merely distracting a display of affluence which to some extent is used in the service of a work which exposes a society addicted to affluence, as Richard Strauss’s Salome does.
At the Royal Opera, David McVicar, working with designer Es Devlin, has mounted a production of Salome which, like the same house’s Ariadne auf Naxos, is two-tiered. Upstairs, a load of seedy toffs in evening wear — we’re in the 1920s — are having a meal; downstairs — much the larger proportion of the space — we see something between a kitchen and a bathhouse, vaguely reminiscent of de Chirico. A naked woman is taking a shower as the curtain rises, and doesn’t get dressed for some time, though she has no part to play in the action. The besotted Narraboth, captain of the guard, reels on the spiral staircase connecting the two levels, exclaiming about Salome’s beauty while everyone ignores him, and killing himself with a flick-knife when Salome tries to kiss Jokanaan. Salome naturally has lots of chances to slink up and down the staircase, and whatever one may feel about Nadja Michael’s performance of the title role, she does slink well. The object of her passion is suitably disgusting, too, for the purposes of the drama.
Michael Volle’s Jokanaan is a writhing heavyweight, though whether he is writhing from desire or revulsion is impossible to say; his long hair, fleshy and unsavoury torso and filthy clothes give us a comprehensive image of ‘the fanatic’ and are congruent with the extremely banal music Strauss awards any character who shows signs of spirituality. Volle gives the most completely satisfying account of any figure in the piece, using his large voice to sonorous denunciatory effect, and overacting as little as anyone in McVicar’s conception can get away with.
What is strange is that those elements that one would have thought would have a special appeal for McVicar — the pervasive atmosphere of campy obsessional lust, whether Herod’s for Salome or hers for Jokanaan, in each case leading to equally obsessional revulsion — are not explored at all. Nothing in this production is explored. It is as blank as any I have seen. The only perversity on show is that of the producer: who would have expected that the executioner, finally ordered by Herod to descend into the cistern and decapitate Jokanaan, would be naked, allow himself to be covered with the prophet’s blood, and give us a full dorsal view throughout the whole of Salome’s final monologue, only to whip round at Herod’s command and murder her, possibly kissing her too? The only person one half expects to be naked in this opera is Salome, but she gets more clothes on as her ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ proceeds. That’s when the scenery really does get a move on, as she and Herod shoot through the rooms, doing a spot of ballroom dancing, examining an expensive wardrobe, abusing and being abused.
Meanwhile, and woefully, Philippe Jordan conducts a featureless account of this amazing score, though anyone who attended the thrilling concert performance in Manchester three weeks ago was spoiled by the staggering playing of the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda. Jordan treated us to three or four rending dissonances, but mainly just kept things going, a dutiful accompanist to a routine lot of singers. Whether one views Salome herself as primitive or decadent, she must be able to emit streams of gorgeous tone for the final scene to work, and Nadja Michael could only squall. Robin Leggate, replacing Thomas Moser as Herod, sang well but without character, and hardly acted. Michaela Schuster sang the ungrateful role of Herodias, unlike most performers of the role, who simply ham it up, and she even found some traces of dignity in it. But without the crucial tensions generated by the central two and a half characters, counting Herod as the half, the work reveals its fatal secret, that it is not about anything at all, merely pretending to be, so that Strauss can do his favourite thing, which is épater le bourgeois while himself being its perfect, very hardworking incarnation.
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