Oliver Mears’s new production of Salome for Northern Ireland Opera elides Richard Strauss with the worlds of Tennessee Williams and David Lynch. The work has been relocated to the late-20th century American south. There are whiffs of Orpheus Descending and Blue Velvet. We peer at Herod’s dinner party through the windows of his house like voyeurs, though the drama plays itself out in the back garden, strewn with the relics of Salome’s abusive childhood, and where Herod’s brother’s corpse moulders in an ill-concealed grave. Bible-belt Nazarenes cut through the surrounding palisades in an attempt to reach Robert Hayward’s Jokanaan, a shit-soaked revivalist immured in a disused oil tanker. Salome’s disastrous sexual awakening, hideous in its violence, is emblematic of a society that is rotten to its core.
It’s real a white-knuckle ride that never lets up, though there are occasional slips. Despite the sweaty, gun-toting soldiery, Mears never fully establishes the nature of the political power that enables Herod to hold a man without trial, then summarily order his execution. The dance is performed not by Giselle Allen, who plays Salome, but by dancer Hayley Chilvers in a fantasy sequence at once erotic and repellant, that sits a bit awkwardly with the rest of the production.
It all sounds terrific. Allen’s cries of passion have a disturbing animal rapture. Michael Colvin’s Herod is more lyrical than many and thus nastier than most. Hayward suggests innate nobility even in extremes of degradation. Conductor Nicholas Chalmers keeps the score at fever pitch: it’s superbly played, with bags of detail, by the Ulster Orchestra. It’s a fine, startling achievement that confirms Northern Ireland Opera’s growing status as a force to be reckoned with, and marks out Belfast itself as a place to be for cutting-edge music theatre.
