Grotesque and gripping: Opera Ballet Vlaanderen unveils a new Salome in Antwerp

Rehearsals for Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s new Salome began on the day that Donald Trump regained the US presidency. Jan Vandenhouwe, OBV’s Artistic Director, cites radical ideologies and polarisation in today’s society in his programme introduction. And director Ersan Mondtag sees contemporary parallels in his staging of Strauss’ opera, but looks East rather than West. Herod’s Judean rule is that of a tinpot dictator, a vassal here modelled on Alexander Lukashenko, Vladimir Putin’s Belarusian puppet. The opera ends in a bloody, plot-twisting coup d’état (spoiler below).

Mondtag’s set – an imposing 7m high palace on a revolve – apes Soviet propagandist architecture with giant heads of Herod and Herodias carved into the brutalist edifice. The cold exterior rotates to reveal an orgiastic palace, draped in bordello red flanked by theatre boxes. It reeks of decadence and decay. Mondtag emphasises the grotesque, giving bodysuits to the principal Judeans: Herod pot-bellied, Herodias with sagging breasts. Only the principal singers are permitted bold shots of primary colour; the rest are in greys or fatigues. The Jews have pointy alien-like skulls. Four naked priestesses (bodysuits again) often accompany Salome, initially wearing conical hoods.  

During the palace’s rotation, two giant mosaics are revealed: a devil with a baby; and a woman with horns. Salome is a devil child, flame-haired, dressed in red velvet. She is very hands on with Jochanaan, a fundamentalist dressed in contrasting blue robes, unchaining him and removing his blindfold, teasing him, caressing him, threatening him with a dagger. Jochanaan, in turn, is more than usually intrigued with her, the two locked nose-to-nose at his rejection of her as a suffocating yellow smog engulfs the stage (brilliantly lit by Sascha Zauner). 

Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils begins with cold, robotic moves but turns into a sinister ensemble waltz during which, in a hallucinatory sequence that is part-fantasy, part-nightmare, Jochanaan appears. It winds up with Herodias naked and cowering while the screams of Salome being raped by Herod are heard off-stage. 

As the biblical debauchery climaxes with Salome’s demand for Jochanaan’s head, her acolytes quaff Champagne and munch popcorn. After Herod gives in – Salome toting a machine-gun at his head persuades him to acquiesce – there’s a bloody denouement. While passionately kissing Jochanaan’s decapitated head (or is it?!), the revolving stage reveals a mass execution of the Jews, the guards are all shot, Herodias is flung into Jochanaan’s vacant cell and Herod, after ordering Salome to be slain (“Man töte dieses Weib!”), takes a bullet to the back of the head as his stepdaughter raises the prophet’s “head” – Jochanaan still very much alive – aloft in triumph. Not a great day for the patriarchy. 

A great afternoon for Astrid Kessler though. I caught her Salome at the Volksoper Wien last season (the old Luc Bondy Covent Garden show) and she was just as impressive here in this matinee. She doesn’t possess a huge soprano, but it has a steely edge that slices across the orchestra. With lyrical soft notes, she can scale it down to coquettish too and is an agile stage performer, doing a fair impression of a teenage tantrum, tearing the curtains down and ripping a cushion apart when Herod initially turns down her disturbing request. 

Kostas Smoriginas was equally strong as Jochanaan, his virile bass-baritone doing justice to the prophet’s denunciations. With less hair than Lukashenko, but a greasy combover, Florian Stern (mostly in the alternative cast, so not in the press photos here) was a repulsive Herod, his oily tenor oozing its way around the vocal lines. Angela Denoke’s soprano is pretty hollow now; a Salome of note in years gone by, she rasped and leered vividly as Herodias, a mother less poisonous than usual. 

Denzil Delaere’s Narraboth was sung with a bright Heldentenor-ish sheen. Rather than killing himself, tormented by the sight of Salome’s infatuation with Jochanaan, he is fatally caught in the crossfire when guards shoot at the prisoner, another of Mondtag's neat twists. 

Alejo Pérez’s pacing was assured and he drew robust playing from the Symfonisch Orkest Opera Ballet Vlaanderen who were revelling in Strauss’ lurid score, with pungent woodwind solos and sinus-clearing brass, all the better for hammering home Mondtag’s satisfyingly brutal production. 

Mark's travel to Antwerp was funded by Opera Ballet Vlaanderen