Heady stuff: Salome, a bloody and brutal heroine for our age?

Australian theatre director Adena Jacobs says her new production of Salome – opening at the London Coliseum later this week – will be “mythic, feminine and brutally contemporary”. Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera, based on Oscar Wilde’s play, was always contemporary, always brutal. Any tale involving a severed head, a pathological, nubile virgin and her perverted stepfather runs that risk.
It is unlikely Jacobs will recreate the shock that Strauss’s opera – and Wilde’s play – generated more than a century ago. The opera premiered in Dresden on 9 December 1905 and, despite – or because of – its... read more