Is it morally acceptable to host an Israeli theatre company in London’s West End in the midst of the war in Gaza? Reviving Oscar Wilde’s baroque one-act tragedy, Gesher – founded as a company to bridge Israeli and Russian culture – give special thanks to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the programme. Four performers cite working with the IDF Theatre in their biographies. No doubt, audiences will answer the ethical question of attending this production by voting with their feet.
Security on press night is airport tight: body frisks for men, metal detector searches for women. Inside, Gaza is the elephant in the room – until a single protester begins chanting. He gets a round of applause.
Laying aside the politics of its programming, this production by Russian director Maxim Didenko is breathtakingly bad. The story of Salomé (Neta Roth), stepdaughter of the Tetrarch Herod (Doron Tavori), and her destructive infatuation with “strange prophet” Jokanaan (Shir Sayag), turns into full-on melodrama when he rejects her advances.
Things go bad early on. The Syrian officer (Itamar Peres) comes on singing his lines and rounds off, bizarrely, with a yodel. Ancient Galilee is turned into what looks like a Dubai hotel, complete with gold bathtub and bar. As in Steven Berkoff’s (astonishing) expressionist version, a piano accompanies the drama but it sounds like elevator music.
Actors gravely overplay their parts. Jokanaan, bare but for shorts and a blindfold, often appears in a raised glass box, singing in comically high-pitched tones before a shutter comes down like a guillotine. “What a strange voice,” says Salomé. Quite.
Salomé herself, in gold dress, behaves erratically, sitting by the bar gorging on grapes and sticking out her tongue before doing her dance in Liberace-grade gold lamé for Herod.
Water sloshes from the tub and stagehands come on with giant mops to wipe it away while the play continues around them. Topless men with hoods over their heads are executed in slow motion and it looks queasily like an eroticising of torture. A silver-encrusted serpent puppet does a lap around the stage and exits.
At times, you have to stifle the laughs but also the yawns. Although under two hours long, it feels endless. Current-day resonances of violence, tyranny, persecution and vengeance bear down on Wilde’s play, however much the production seeks to locate it in a hotel-room-style La La Land.
• At Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 11 October
