Salome (review)

In an article in Toronto's The Globe and Mail, just before this revival of his 1996 production opened, Atom Egoyan recorded his renewed sense of liberation in stripping away the extraneous imagery that is often associated with Strauss's Salome: "I became really thrilled by this almost lost piece of text by Oscar Wilde . . . I think we forget that it is a psychodrama, almost Strindbergian with this focus on a dysfunctional family" (19 January 2002: R4). While his claim that Wilde's text is almost lost is debatable, the success of Egoyan's production depended primarily on his reexamination of the libretto and bold discarding of its production traditions. Staged in Derek McLane's claustrophobic, tilted chamber, overlooked by mysterious sentries on a covered bridge and upstaged by video and film projections that at times disrupted the characters' pretensions, the Herod family's battle was enacted in modern dress by a cast that made the opera's depiction of overheated eroticism very credible.

Egoyan's production seemed to be particularly inspired by his reading of the final scene, in which Salome's predatory desire for Jochanaan's body climaxes in triumph over his severed head and Herod's equally predatory desire for Salome's body climaxes in his having her crushed by his soldiers' shields. Egoyan changed the ending in a small but radical way: no soldiers responded to Herod's command, and he himself strangled her with the blindfold that had belonged to Jochanaan and had become a kind of fetish for Salome. The strangulation not only signified the silencing of Salome's monstrous sexuality, but brought together references to the two bodily images that dominate the text and had visually dominated Egoyan's production—eyes and mouths. As Slavoj Zizek observes, "what makes [the closing scene] a perverted version of the Wagnerian Liebestod is that what Salome demands . . . is to kiss the lips of John the Baptist . . ., not contact with a person but with a partial object" (Opera's Second Death 201). As though anticipating Zizek, the production from the beginning focused on mouths and eyes, and speaking and looking. Jochanaan's offstage proclamations from the subterranean cistern were visualized by a close-up video image of the singer's mouth on a large screen in the set's upstage wall. Salome, having obsessed over Jochanaan's body and hair, and finally fixated on his mouth, "like a band of scarlet on an ivory tower," seized a gun with which the distraughtly jealous Narraboth had just shot himself, and "painted" a huge electronic image of a scarlet mouth onto the same screen. Similarly, the production emphasized the obsessions of the erotic gaze, with blocking that was driven by characters' specular desires. In the opening scene, Egoyan visually set up an interlocking pattern in which the Page gazed at Narraboth, who gazed fixatedly at Salome, who was equally fixated on Jochanaan. As Salome's obsession with parts of Jochanaan's body grew, the Page (a mature woman in Egoyan's production) performed fellatio on Narraboth, and inevitably his suicide by shooting coincided with his sexual climax.

Parts of the production were dominated by video and film images, designed by Phillip Barker. The opening featured projections on an overhead screen that both showed events that were apparently happening offstage, but also images that suggested that the health-spa in which the production seemed to be set was also a site of violence, as when the image of a woman's body being given a mud bath was displaced by the prescient image of an apparently violated woman lying in mud. In the production's most radical revisioning, the traditionally problematic "Dance of the Seven Veils" began with a film (projected onto Salome's voluminous skirt as she was hoisted up into the flies) in which the young Salome, sometimes facing us blindfolded, ran through an apparently endless forest. We watched...