Oscar Wilde wrote one masterpiece and several highly entertaining plays for the theatre. Then there was Salome. Wilde's rarely performed version of the Biblical story, originally written in French, is feverish and fetid - as if composed with a high temperature and an overdose of Lemsip while lying in unwashed sheets.
Richard Strauss got the best of it when he turned it into an opera, but theatre directors have difficulty walking that fine line between the sublime and the fin-de-siècle ridiculousness of it all.
Patrick Sandford opts for a contemporary, noddingly minimalist approach, setting this story of erotic obsession in a modern-day, militarised Middle-Eastern state where Tim Woodward's Herod, who has married his brother's wife, is a puppet dictator in thrall to the empire of Caesar. As a political comment it is hardly startling, but desire and death are always entwined here as Herod lusts after his niece, Salome (Katie McGuinness), who raises the temperature in her infamous dance with the proximity of flesh to weapons and who ends up, not stark naked, but clad in military garb.
Ultimately, you cannot get away from the fact that this is nothing more than a play about a teenage girl getting into a terrible strop because the man she fancies rejects her. But Robin Don's steely design with its sharp edges and male hardness cleverly offsets the flowery opulence and exotic erotica of Wilde's language, which blooms all over the place like a slightly smutty Victorian greeting card.
McGuinness gets the spoiled-little-princess act just right, although she does not really portray the girl becoming a woman; Jane Maud suggests the bitter disappointment of a woman who knows she is less desirable than her daughter, and Woodward offers a weak man pretending to be strong. Not worth losing your head over, but an intriguing oddity.
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