★★☆☆☆
In his programme note for this, the opening show of English National Opera’s season, Daniel Kramer (ENO’s artistic director) promised a “bold statement of intent” that would “expose the story’s patriarchal framework”. Wow, all that plus Strauss’s torrid music and necrophilia too! My pulse went into overdrive.
To expose a framework, however, you need to have it in the first place. Adena Jacobs’s staging of Salome is so bereft of historical or geographical context — not to mention a set and some props hitherto thought essential, such as a severed head — that the result is not the searing feminist critique that its Australian director perhaps intended, but a cold-hearted, half-baked conceptual riff on an opera that should leave you shattered.
It’s not that