Salome Songbirds A Rare Flight Of Fancy
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday June 3, 1993
GRAEME Murphy's Salome is a rare bird indeed. It premiered during the Melbourne season just ended, and has now flown north for the winter. Sydney will get its first look at the latest Australian Opera collaboration between Murphy and designer Kristian Fredrikson (Turandot in 1990) tomorrow night.
Fredrikson gives flight to his imagination (literally) in this production, as yesterday's dress rehearsal revealed.
The set is a huge bird cage made of iron bars and wire mesh, edged with spikes, over which is suspended a moon of beaten silver.
The main characters in Richard Strauss's opera are also ornithological: Salome (American soprano Mary-Jane Johnson) struts the stage like a peacock, clutching a large fan, while vulturine Herod (Christopher Doig) and his turkey queen, Herodias (Rosemary Gunn), preen in fine plumage of turquoise blue and crimson respectively. The quarrelsome Jews are rendered as black crows.
Only Jokanaan (Michael Gluecksmann) does not look as if he is about to fly the coop. He moves like the ivory statue of Salome's description.
Murphy justifies his approach in part by referring to fleeting references in the libretto to doves and peacocks.
"The main characters are songbirds who cannot communicate with each other -they are different species and should not be sharing the same cage.
"Further, I would suggest that dictators such as Herold build prisons for themselves."
His direction veers from the coy stylisation of the Dance of the Seven Veils (with the veils personified in the form of chalk-white, bare-chested male dancers) to stomach-turning naturalism (the life-like head of John the Baptist, dripping blood, which is impaled by Salome on a stake).
The Age's critic gave Salome a rave review, but perhaps the Sydney critics are birds of a different feather ...
© 1993 Sydney Morning Herald
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