So, Salome is in town. At the Theatre Royal Haymarket, no less. One of Oscar Wilde’s old haunts. The press release lands, you see the director is Maxim Didenko, the company is Israel’s Gesher Theatre. Interesting. A Russian director, an Israeli company, an Irish writer, in London. Already a complicated set of ingredients.
And then the reviews start to come in. And you realise you’re not looking at a play anymore. You’re looking at a collision.
On the one hand, you read a review, like the one in London Cult, that makes it sound like the second coming. A ravishing, psychologically deep, visually stunning masterpiece. Gold everywhere, a pool on stage, a vision of decadent luxury. An actor playing Herod like a monstrous spider. An actress playing Herodias who is the very definition of regal beauty. And at the centre, a Salome who is a tragic, damaged child lashing out, and a prophet, Jokanaan, whose voice – sung by a countertenor – is apparently something not of this earth. It sounds intoxicating. A proper night at the theatre. The kind of thing that reminds you what the stage can do.
Then you open The Guardian.
And Arifa Akbar tells you the whole thing is dreadful. Morally questionable, artistically bankrupt. She talks about airport-style security to get in, about the politics of an Israeli state-funded company performing in the West End right now. She calls the production itself “incredibly dull”. Melodramatic. Over-acted. The prophet’s voice is “comically high”. The lavish set looks like a hotel in Dubai. The whole thing, she says, is an endless, boring slog.
So which is it? Is it a profound tragedy or a tedious mess? A visionary masterpiece or a political misstep? How can two people sit in the same room, watch the same actors say the same words, and come away with such completely, fundamentally different experiences?
What are we, the audience, supposed to make of that?
You look for clues in what the director himself says. Didenko talks about being fascinated by the story since he was young. About wanting to connect Wilde’s text to our own age of authoritarians, of strange and dysfunctional ruling families. That makes sense. It’s a good hook. He mentions going to Jerusalem, feeling the explosive energy of the place. He talks about the actors finding a living, breathing way to speak Wilde’s poetic, mannered text. He sounds passionate, intelligent. He sounds like a man who has a clear idea of what he wants to do.
But his vision seems to have landed in two different worlds simultaneously.
The world of the first review is a world of pure theatre. A dark room where history and politics fall away and you are left with a primal story about lust, power, and destruction. A story where the beauty of the set and the power of the performances are the only things that matter. It’s a seductive idea. That art can, and should, exist in its own bubble, on its own terms.
The world of the second review is the world outside the theatre doors. A world where it’s impossible to ignore who paid for the production, where the actors are from, and what is happening in the news while they are on stage. In this world, the set doesn’t look like a timeless palace of art, it looks like the gaudy lobby of a hotel in a conflicted part of the world. The actors aren’t just characters; they are representatives. The play itself becomes secondary to the event of its performance.
Actually, scrap that. The interesting thing isn’t which review is ‘right’. That’s a pointless question. The interesting thing is the gap between them. It feels like one of those old optical illusion drawings. The one that’s either a vase or two faces looking at each other. Some people look at this production and they can only see the vase – the shape of the art, the classical tragedy. Other people look at it and they can only see the two faces – the politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict staring each other down. And each side is completely baffled by the fact that the other can’t see what is so blindingly obvious to them.
I remember a time, not so long ago, when you could go to the theatre and just see a play. It might be good, it might be bad, but the stakes felt contained within the building. Now, it feels like every ticket comes with a reading list and a moral compass check. You’re not just a member of the audience; you’re a participant in a cultural argument.
And this production of Salome, whether by accident or design, has become a perfect example of that. It’s a lightning rod.
The thing is, Wilde’s play was always a provocation. It was banned in London for decades. It was seen as decadent, blasphemous, and dangerous. It was a piece of art that deliberately poked at the sensibilities of its time. It forced people to confront things they would rather ignore.
Maybe, in its own messy, contradictory way, that’s what Didenko’s production is doing. It’s forcing a confrontation. Not just about the story of a Jewish princess and a holy man, but about what we want from theatre in 2025. Do we want an escape? A beautiful, self-contained aesthetic experience? Or do we want an engagement with the world as it is, in all its ugliness and complexity?
I can’t tell you whether you should see it. What do you want to see? A timeless tragedy about a passion for destruction? Or a clumsy, tone-deaf melodrama that makes you feel complicit in something you’d rather not be? Because from the sounds of it, you can go to the Haymarket and see either. Or both. Or neither.
Whatever is happening on that stage – whether it’s brilliant or awful – the real drama seems to be the argument it has started. And that feels like something Oscar Wilde would have appreciated.
