Yaël Farber’s ‘Salomé’ is a genuinely Biblical spectacle. Even if you hate it, there will be moments when designer Susan Hilferty and her team will make your jaw plummet, as cascades of sand and diaphanous walls of cloth descend without warning from the Olivier’s vertiginous ceiling to frame some extraordinary new tableaux. It feels ancient and huge, a lost broadcast from a time of legend.
Almost as spectacular is the portentousness of the script – written by Farber – which wouldn’t be out of place in one of those otherwise impressive computer games where you smile politely during the talking bits. It is cumbersome and cold and has no sense of humour whatsoever. An absence of self-consciousness has surely helped Farber as a director, but I can’t help but think it’s a fatal handicap when it comes to her writing.
‘Salomé’ began life as an attempt to adapt Oscar Wilde’s famous play of the same name, but Farber’s explorations led her onto something more ambitious. She was galvanised by her surprise at discovering that the dancing girl who demanded the head of John the Baptist from King Herod was never actually named in any of the Gospels, and that much of the associated myth – the dance of the seven veils, for instance – was Wilde’s invention, with the ‘real’ woman largely snuffed out of history.
Farber sets about righting the wrong the only way she knows how: by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it. Clouds of dry ice. Constant, intricate, wailing song. Iokanaan the Zealot (aka John the Baptist, played by the charismatic Ramzi Choukair) bawling with extreme intensity in... Aramaic? Nudity. Lots of nudity. Two versions of Salomé (one old, Olwen Fouéré’s Nameless; one young, Isabella Nefar’s Salomé so-called). Dialogue that would fail the Turing Test. Speeches like ‘Game of Thrones’ fanfic. Soldiers carrying anachronistic machine guns. An ’80s synth line. A convulsing, eccentric Jesus who basically doesn’t do anything except look cool.
It is kind of amazing, but you have to really look very hard to find a shred of relatable humanity. In its mountainous immensity it loses track of the idea that the dancing girl – whoever she was – was a person as well as a symbol.
Farber’s best work is incredibly affecting because she blows up the writing of others to a scale or intensity that most Western directors are simply afraid of. ‘Salomé’ is her grandest spectacle to date, but the clanging script buries its heart.