It’s not been a great month for celebrated auteurs. First, Ivo van Hove delivers a lacklustre Obsession at the Barbican. Now Yaël Farber, the South African writer-director rightly acclaimed for Mies Julie and Les Blancs, comes up with a radical revision of the Salomé myth that is slow-moving and portentous. The stage pictures may be impressive, but they are tied to the ball and chain of a terrible text.
Farber’s purpose is to reclaim the story of Salomé from the hands of the historian Flavius Josephus and later interpreters such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Richard Strauss. Instead of the femme fatale who danced naked before Herod and demanded the head of Iokanaan, she becomes a symbol of persecuted womanhood who acquires political agency.
To this end, Farber splits the character in two. One, simply called Nameless, is the somewhat garrulous embodiment of voiceless women down the ages. The younger Salomé lives in Roman-occupied Judea, is the victim of her rapacious stepfather, Herod, and ultimately the instrument of profound change. If she seeks the death of the prophet Iokanaan (John the Baptist), it is so that his martyrdom may ignite the fire of revolution.
In theory, I welcome a reinterpretation of misogynist myth. But Farber’s text is a patchwork affair that seems uneasily pitched between the lush sensuality of the Song of Solomon and the archaic solemnity of a Cecil B de Mille biblical movie.
Herod has the worst of it: at one point, he informs Salomé, “Between your thighs are secret ravines that will quench my thirst,” and at another, “The joints of your thighs are like jewels.” But everyone gets to talk either in this ludicrously purple prose, where a face is invariably a “countenance”, or in language of gnomic oddity. When Nameless says, “I am peace and war has come because of me”, I wasn’t sure whether we were meant to admire her pacific or incendiary qualities.
Farber and her production team use every possible device to lend the text an unearned momentousness. Susan Hilferty’s design embraces everything from cascading sand to static tableaux reminiscent of the Last Supper. Adam Cork’s music and sound give off a persistently ominous hum. Tim Lutkin’s lighting oscillates between piercing brightness and shrouded gloom.
Olwen Fouéré, once a famous Salomé in a Steven Berkoff production of the Wilde play, delivers the Nameless figure’s contradictory utterances as if they had a Beckettian significance. Isabella Nefar lends Salomé’s younger self dignity and poise even as she disrobes. The best of the men is Ramzi Choukair who, as the Arabic-speaking Iokanaan, rages plausibly against Roman oppression, but there is little Paul Chahidi can do with Herod except exude an oily lasciviousness.
The real problem is the disproportion between the avalanche of a production and the absurdity of the text. Farber may reject Wilde’s Salomé, but Oscar was surely right when he said: “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.”
• At the National Theatre, London, until 15 July. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
