A cloud cuts across the face of the moon. A woman dances to kill. A clown king’s rule begins to crumble.?
Rarely performed and relentlessly misunderstood, SALOME is Oscar Wilde at his most vulnerable, impenetrable, honest, mystifying. Written in raw, simple French, then dismally translated by Wilde’s lover Bosie, for years the play was largely dismissed as a Victorian oddity, an excuse to show some skin.
But in this new translation by director James Rutherford, Salome reveals itself as a tragic parable of queer longing. Pouring his own doomed desires into the imprisoned prophet Iokanaan, the mercurial princess Salome, and even the vulgar paranoid Herod Antipas, Wilde explodes a Biblical footnote into a surreal moonscape of alienated passion.
Eerily prescient, utterly mysterious, Salome is a prophecy of social destruction, a parable of what nightmares erupt when we demonize desire, criminalize otherness, and look but never see.
