Salome, Northern Ireland Opera/Grand Opera House, Belfast: review

Stylishly led by Oliver Mears and generously cushioned by the Arts Council, Northern Ireland Opera has built a considerable reputation in recent years for sparky, edgy work that engages with native musicians and creates a bit of a splash.

For a part-time organisation like this to undertake a new production of Richard Strauss’ Salome, a problematic work requiring substantial orchestral forces which it is presenting for only two performances, may be madly ambitious bordering on extravagant folly, but I think they almost get away with it. The first-night audience was gripped and enthusiastic, and whatever one thought of the bizarre staging, there was no question of the performance’s overall panache and immediacy.

Mears has translated the New Testament setting of Herod’s court to a backwater of the modern American south. Herod becomes a Big Daddy figure, presiding over a modest stockaded ranch, in the yard of which Jokanaan has (bafflingly) been imprisoned in a small oil tank. Salome is his sulky nymphet stepdaughter, who looks anything but sweet-sixteen-and-never-been-kissed.

Hints of Bible Belt fundamentalism are in the air, but it is never clear what Jokanaan represents, nor why his jeremiads should cause so much anxiety. The updating may gain in terms of visual immediacy – and Mears can certainly get singers acting and moving – but the premise of Wilde’s original drama loses all its psychological plausibility in the process.

Giselle Allen, a local girl, sang the title-role with vibrant tone and eager warmth. The text, translated into English and projected without benefit of surtitles, was blurred at times, but she nailed the big moments and flung herself at the challenge with abandon. Robert Hayward’s Jokanaan was her match for fervour, and Herod and Herodias were sharply etched by Michael Colvin and Heather Shipp.

The Ulster Orchestra attacked the polychromatic score with fearless bravado, and although the brass occasionally came to grief and there wasn’t much finesse on offer, the vitality of the playing under Nicholas Chalmers’ firm baton never faltered.

A little factitious controversy was whipped up in the prurient local press through leaked reports that the Dance of the Seven Veils would go the whole hog and climax in the revelation of female nakedness. Cue shock and protest from various of the city’s religious minorities. In the event, subtly choreographed by Anna Morrissey and brilliantly executed Hayley Chilvers as Salome’s proxy, the dance was almost the best thing in the evening DASH dangerously provocative, mesmerisingly odd and thrillingly erotic. I was sitting next to a minister of the cloth who had remained rigidly still until this episode, when he began to wriggle nervously. The unsettling power of art!

Until Sunday: www.niopera.com, 028 9027 7734