THEATRE REVIEW: Salome - Southwark Playhouse, London.

My first thought after seeing this compelling and unique production was that of a durable elastic band being very slowly stretched by two people at a time across a large studio space over 86 minutes: a painfully elongated process whereby its viewers are teased, played with and ultimately on edge in the knowledge that at some point it has to snap. Metaphorically this represents Salome, currently showing at London’s Southwark Playhouse: a provocatively taut interpretation which hangs us uncertainly from the top of a vertiginous cliff, for its entire duration. 

A re-working and more immersive version of their Greenwich Theatre run in 2019, this is the Lazarus Theatre Company’s 44th production since their founding in 2007: a company “committed to reinvestigating, revitalising and reimagining classic works, making them accessible to a contemporary audience”. In this, their third staging of Oscar Wilde’s publicly banned play (due to its depiction of biblical characters), Salome is regendered as a male character. It is an almost seamless transposition from Wilde’s original and makes for an evocative exploration of the homosexual male gaze. 

Staged in traverse with the audience on two sides, this piece of corridor theatre immerses the audience into the action for an unbroken tense, thrilling and appalling nearly 90 minutes. On entry to the space, the scene is set bathed in gold: a long catwalk stretching the full width of the audience, a pair of hostess trolleys, candelabras and a multitude of weighted helium balloons, with pumping, grittily repetitive music; Sorcha Corcoran’s set and Ben Jacobs' sound design powerfully setting the scene for the debauchery and decadence that is to come.   

The ensemble cast of six actors are finely tuned - from the tense opening dialogue of a soldier and his captain who voices his forbidden desire for Salome as the imprisoned Jokanaan (aka John the Baptist) slowly paces the periphery of the set - a disturbing presence covered in blood and excrement induced by his torturous dungeon-existence; to the emergence of an obsessive Salome, immersed and unflinching in his desire for the lips of Jokanaan - a highly internalised performance by Fred Thomas who embodies the role with an authenticity that I think would garner Wilde’s approval. Herodias is provocatively played by Pauline Babula who wants nothing but to erode her husband’s “ridiculous” behaviour, with humorous non-verbal asides as she pretends to pander to his infinite needs. But it is Jamie O’Neill’s performance as King Herod that is acting at its most captivating and risk-taking - as he lauds it over all in his presence with his vile, demanding and toxic behaviour - narcissistically presiding over the famous ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ (whereby Salome displays a seductive removing of a vibrantly theatrical turquoise ball-gown), Herod ultimately reaping what he has recklessly sown as the severed head of Jokanan is given to a deranged and fixated Salome in a plastic bag, by way of his shockingly requested reward.

Director of both the company and production Ricky Dukes, excels in his re-interpretation of Salome - expertly straddling the genres of melodramatic Greek Tragedy with heightened contemporary drama - a stylised, exciting and in his own words “guttural” audience experience. And so good to see, after our own ‘pause in proceedings’, a play whose writer sadly failed to see staged in his lifetime, taken into 21st Century orbit.

Reviewer - Georgina Elliott

on - 27.8.21