This Salome distracts with noise and spectacle, but without seduction its tragedy collapses into emptiness.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I walked into a theatre already feeling unsettled before the play had even begun. But that was the case with the Israeli theatre company Gesher’s Salome at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. From the unusually heavy security checks to the tense atmosphere in the foyer, there was a sense that we were about to witness something deliberately uncomfortable and in many ways, that expectation carried into the production itself. Oscar Wilde’s Salome is a text obsessed with rhythm. Its repetitions are supposed to build a pulse, a kind of hypnotic inevitability that pushes us toward THAT moment: the dance and the beheading. But this production by Maxim Didenko never found that rhythm. What should have been tense felt slack and awkward.
The play debuts with the Syrian officer bursting on stage, singing his lines, only to round off with an inexplicable yodel. In my view, it was the first of many choices that tipped the drama from ritual into farce. The set placed us in what looked like a glossy hotel lobby, somewhere between art deco opulence and a nightclub. There was a bathtub, a stocked bar, a piano and other trappings of wealth, which might have worked as commentary on decadence. Instead, it felt like the wrong metaphor entirely.
At the centre of the action was Salome, played by Neta Roth. Wilde wrote her as a dangerously seductive femme fatale, someone whose desire morphs into something monstrous. Here, she was played more like a tomboyish oddball, almost a freakish adolescent. Roth’s Salome pouted, gorged on grapes, stuck out her tongue, and, in her big moment, performed the famous dance wearing a giant silver snake head only to end up topless in the water fountain. Instead of seduction, we got bratty flamboyance. The dangerous allure, the raw pull of desire that drives her to demand the unspeakable, simply wasn’t there.
Jokanaan (Shir Sayag), wearing a pair of shorts and a blindfolded, was at least unsettling. He appeared repetable from a window-like opening in what would have been the cistern he was imprisoned in, delivering prophecies in an unnervingly high falsetto that put me in mind of Klaus Nomi. The performance veered toward the caricature of a schizophrenic visionary, and without any convincing chemistry between him and Salome. The central dynamic of desire versus rejection never caught fire. When she finally demanded his head, it felt disconnected from what had come before.
Herod, played by Doron Tavori, was one of the stronger turns. His sweaty obsession with Salome, his insistence and lingering gaze, did create tension, though even here, the point was made with too much insistence, more hammering than haunting.
Around them, the stage became a carousel of odd choices: water sloshed from the tub until stagehands shuffled on mid-scene with giant mops, distracting from the action. Topless men in hoods were executed in slow motion, a queasy eroticising of torture that left me cold. A giant silver serpent puppet circled the stage for no apparent reason before retreating again. It was theatrical excess for its own sake.
The water vessel on stage, that great bathtub at the set’s centre, kept drawing my attention. I wonder if it was a reference to the baptismal font with holy water, a medium through which the faithful cross thresholds of life, death, and rebirth. Here, though, I couldn’t pin down its meaning. Was it meant to be sacred? Profane? On this stage, it was touched not by sanctity but by madness in Jokanaan’s presence, by lust during Salome’s dance, and by death as the climax unfolded. Instead of a portal to renewal, the water felt tainted, emptied of redemption.
Visually, some moments almost worked. Jokanaan’s backlit appearances in the window, reminded me of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro with shafts of light cutting through shadow with an almost painterly drama. But these flashes felt imposed, as if stitched into a collage that didn’t belong. The mix of biblical story, hotel-lobby kitsch, Caravaggio-style tableaux, and horror-show grotesquery ended up more like a lost episode of American Horror Story than a coherent staging of Wilde.
Salome is supposed to make us shudder at the monstrosity of desire, at the fragile line between love and death. This production gave us noise, glitter, and mediocre tactics, but never seduction. Without seduction, there is no tragedy, only emptiness.