On 6/8/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
>
> I do get it that the words of a play are just a scaffold for
> performers and directors, and sometimes plays with a lot worse
> problems than Salome can be made electrifying. And vice versa,
> unfortunately. In the context of this poets' list it's the words
> which are finally at issue. And unlike a performance they have the
> advantage of being available.
It's a furphy that a great production can "make up for" rotten words. It
doesn't, any more than good skin can conceal a broken femur. Language is
absolutely crucial in theatre. It always causes me pain to see actors
working their arses off trying to make a silk purse from a sow's ear, as
much as seeing a great text done badly.
> Of course it's about chasteness, that's why it's filled with
> temptations. I bet you a nickle it's the temptations that bring the
> crowds in. And that Wilde was aware of this.
I've never seen the opera, which would be an utterly different experience.
But this comment seems to me to suggest, with the censors, that Wilde was
just pushing soft porn, which is I think rather unfair on Wilde. I'll be
lazy and paste something I prepared earlier, which fwiw articulates clearly
my thoughts about this play:
Oscar Wilde's enduring popularity is due, in part, to the fact that he is a
figure of unsettling modernity: the *fin de siècle* decor of his writings,
which otherwise might date him as badly as Swinburne, is underlaid by a
tough, unsparing intelligence. This is as true of his less well-known
writing as it is of the plays which established him as the greatest comic
playwright since his fellow Irishman, Sheridan.
The fairy tales in the collection *The House of Pomegranates* ("intended,"
said Wilde, "neither for the British child nor the British public") rank
high in his achievement: they are not only enchanting, beautifully wrought
stories, but among his most serious meditations on (for example) the
relationship between art and feeling, or the place of love in religion, or
the ethics of public authority. And they also demonstrate his capacity -
more evident in his prose, in fact, than in his poetry - for sustaining
extremes of poetic language.
Of Wilde's plays, the closest in both sensibility and diction to his fairy
tales is *Salome*. Perhaps the strangest of Wilde's plays, this one-acter
retells the Biblical story of Salome, step-daughter of the tetrarch Herod
Antipas, who requests the head of Jokaanan (John the Baptist) on a silver
platter as her reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils.
Originally written in French, its English premiere was cancelled when the
Lord Chamberlain refused it a license, deeming it illegal to represent
Biblical characters on stage. This ban held until 1931, but it did not stop
private performances of the play, including one that sparked a 1918 trial
for criminal libel which bore startling similarities to the trial that
brought about Wilde's own downfall. The suit was brought against Noel
Pemberton Billing, the properietor of a right wing journal called *The
Vigilante*, by the actress Maud
Allen<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MaudeAllanSalomeHead.jpg>,
who, in an attack on a production of Salome in which she performed the title
role, was accused of being a member of the "Cult of the Clitoris" - a coded
accusation of homosexuality.
.......
*Salome* is, in fact, about a woman savagely protecting her chasteness from
the lust projected onto her by nearly every man she encounters...Perhaps
what was most troubling to the censors was the beauty of Wilde's language
(described during the trial as a certain sign of the sodomite). This beauty
is felt as a moral affront; and in fact, the authorities were quite correct
to feel this. In Wilde's moral universe, sensuous beauty was a radical
imperative, a manifestation of love - even divine love - that struck
profoundly at the heart of political and moral authority. For example, in *The
Fisherman and his Soul*, the Priest, having cursed the lovers whose profane
corpses have been cast on the beach, prepares to preach a sermon of fire and
brimstone:
"He began to speak to the people, desiring to speak to them of the wrath of
God. But the beauty of the white flowers troubled him, and their odour was
sweet in his nostrils, and there came another word into his lips, and he
spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love. And why he
so spake, he knew not..."
The passions induced by Salome's beauty are much darker. For Salome, what
matters is her chasteness, her moon-like integrity, which are constantly
assailed by the lusts she unwittingly inspires in men, including in her
stepfather Herod. Her revenge is deadly, and most deadly against the one man
who inspires in her an answering desire, only to spurn her, Jokanaan. Salome
knowingly uses the lust she inspires to gain her own ends, finally acceding
to Herod's impassioned requests that she dance for him, and then refusing
all the riches he can offer her in favour of Jokanaan's head. "There are not
dead men enough!" she says, as she orders soldiers to bring it to her.
When Herod witnesses the reality of Salome's desire, he is horrified,
calling her "monstrous", and orders her death. But it's clear that her
desire has been made monstrous by its constant erasure. She is only ever the
object of desire, her own wants ignored by the men who, blinded by their
lust, fail to perceive her at all. In this way they are no different from
Jokanaan, who will not even look at her.
Stephen Berkoff brought his National Theatre production of *Salome* here
several years ago. Although widely disparaged by Melbourne critics, it left
me open-mouthed: aside from featuring one of the most sheerly beautiful
designs I have ever seen, the company's performances of Wilde's Solomonic
language was revelatory, showing me how powerful poetic language can be on
stage, if uttered with complete physical and emotional conviction.
&c
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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