A Love that Tastes of Blood

Bruno Ravella directs Strauss's Salome for Irish National Opera

Sinead Campbell-Wallace (Salome) with the Baptist’s head. Picture by Patricio Cassinoni

Almost exactly a year ago, I travelled to Dublin for the Irish National Opera ‘leg’ of Bruno Ravella’s staging of Der Rosenkavalier, from the UK’s Garsington Opera, in Gary McCann’s sumptuously swirly Jugendstil designs. A return visit to see how the UK-based Italian director would handle Salome, the same composer’s earlier (1905) one-acter, proved irresistible. This time working with the versatile designer Leslie Travers, Ravella sets Strauss’s lurid shocker in an admirably accessible staging in which the narrative is paramount. The production also serves as a compelling showcase for one of Ireland’s busiest sopranos, Sinead Campbell-Wallace, a familiar face at English National Opera but also recently cast as Elsa in the Opéra de Paris’s new Lohengrin.

Here on her home territory, she heads an international cast including Icelandic bass-baritone Tómas Tómasson as Jochanaan (John the Baptist), German tenor Vincent Wolfsteiner as Herod and Irish mezzo Imelda Drumm as Herodias. Compared with the title role, of course, these are bit parts, albeit dramatically crucial ones. The anti-heroine’s grotesque, bickering parents - signifying a dysfunctional, abusive family - almost justify Salome’s perverted sexual fascination with the animalistic, yet censorious figure of the ‘prophet’ whose head she demands when Herod carelessly offers anything she desires if she will dance for him.