What family doesn't have its little ups and downs? Nadja Michael as Salome at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Take a look at the photos from the latest operas at Covent Garden and ENO, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's slasher movie season at the opera. What David McVicar's new production of Salome and David Alden's new staging of Lucia di Lammermoor have in common is blood. Buckets of it.
Poor mad Lucia got herself liberally spattered in the stuff as she dispatched her new, unwanted husband - a job she seems to have gone about with some relish, to judge from the surprised-looking corpse of Arturo which, unusually, we also get to see. And the muscled executioner who presents Salome with John the Baptist's head on a silver platter looks like he has been bathing in a napoletana sauce Jacuzzi - an aspect of his (silent) role that, McVicar claims, necessitated him performing it without the assistance of clothing. In a recent interview, McVicar helpfully offers artistic justification, saying he "thought it was right for him to be naked because his body would show up better the blood from the head he has just cut off". Clearly.
Are the two Davids trying to suggest we should be shocked by all this blood? I don't think so. Lucia is traditionally bloodstained for her famous mad scene. And the final 20 minutes of Salome is an amorous monologue directed at a severed head, so the gore is pretty much compulsory there, too.
I think McVicar might like us to be shocked by the nudity more than the blood. But it didn't work that way for me. At the moment when Duncan Meadows slipped out of his greatcoat to descend the stairs to John the Baptist's cell, my (female) friend next to me let out a snort of laughter, and I found myself stifling giggles through one of the most ominous, sombre passages Strauss ever wrote. The way in which the Royal Opera hired Meadows after McVicar spotted him busking as a standy-still Roman centurion in Covent Garden piazza has made for a nice story, but the only thing that might be called shocking here is that an actor can earn more money standing still outside the opera house than he can moving around onstage inside it.
If anything, seeing these two productions within a few days made me wonder if we're actually being protected even as we think we're being provoked. Both directors introduce a kind of psychoanalysis, which attempts to explain their anti-heroines' nasty behaviour. In Alden's vision, gingham-frocked Lucia is little older than a child when she is married off by an older brother who likes tying her arms to the bedstead while he gropes her chest. And where Salome would usually perform her Dance of the Seven Veils, there is instead a choreographed flashback through seven rooms, suggesting childhood abuse at the hands of her stepfather Herod.
Maybe feminists should cheer for directors who are prepared to dig deeper than most into the minds of their female characters. Or maybe not: in these stagings, both Salome and Lucia are victims. They are not allowed to be monsters, and in a way this diminishes them. But it makes things easier for audiences. In McVicar's Salome, we no longer see a teenage girl so warped and willful that she thinks nothing of doing a striptease for her stepfather in order to get what she wants. Is that version - the one Strauss wrote, more than a century ago - just too shocking for us now?
