I'll end at the beginning: oh my god, you have to see this.
We misuse terms like "mesmerisingly awful"--or at least I do, when I mean "quite bad." But I could not stop looking at this incredible hot mess of a thing on Monday, and I will admit it's stayed with me since. I can't exactly recommend anyone see this--I mean, this is almost certainly the worst thing I've ever seen at the National Theatre, by a considerable margin. But if anyone wants to go, they'll definitely be entertained. Never have I seen anything so purely Mystery Science Theatre at an actual theatre--so inept, so ham-handed (gevalt), so lazy in thematization yet expensive in set and costume. I will, I fear, be remembering this for a very long time, long after (say) a merely dutiful Beggar's Opera. Friends this is a debacle, a fiasco--a Las Vegas trash fire, visible from low orbit. I think you should go. Believe me, there are still tickets.
Only a female director could have created a female role so remorselessly awful for the actor involved--Cleansed without the dignity. Salome spends the first two thirds of the play being raped, the last third naked, and the whole thing as a metaphor for--I dunno. Something. The Middle East, territory, the environment, women. This means that for most of the play she is spared actually saying the play's dialogue, atrocious throughout. But then she does talk, and--oh, it's just awful. Everything everyone says is awful, in two languages at least. If you miss a point, don't worry, it will be explained again unto you, yea until the seventh repetition. This would have been better as a dance piece: actually, possibly, quite an effective one. Being in this production should be looked back on by all involved as a badge of honour, like being in the Marines, or an arctic expedition.
A lost arctic expedition, even. Oh, the blocking: actors wander the stage, lost and alone, like Scott's sailors. Some very fine actors shout abstractions past each other. John the Baptist walks around like a Charles Atlas hero, speaking his dialogue in a different language from everyone else; but then everyone else responds in English, and a variety of accents. (Salome herself an odd mixture of Semitic, Home Counties, and--ahem--Brazilian.) Sometimes the actors get to ride the Olivier stage around and around. I hope that's kind of fun. There is something like a five-minute debate about bringing aqueducts. Two full-time female wailers are provided, for the audience member in need of convincing that civilian massacres have mournful elements. And all of the easiest possible historical ironies get brought out for a curtsy: the Roman with an Irish accent because Troubles, the Jewish soldiers suddenly having AK-47s because blah, the blah because blah. Derp a derpa derp.
And the script: Charlton Heston Biblical dialogue meets Mills and Boon meets a whole lot of really squicky sexuality. As one intoned vaginal metaphor entered its seeming fourth minute, I thought: maybe this really isn't meant to be metaphoric. Maybe this guy just really, really likes clefts.
So, yeah. People are going to get fired over this, it's that terrible. But maybe you should see it? It will live in the memory.
