Salome
London Coliseum

AT ITS best, the combination of plot, music, acting and direction in opera can provide a pinnacle of dramatic and theatrical achievement. Any failure of even one of these elements may result in the kind of production that turns off many theatre-goers.

That's sadly the case here. The audience response to Richard Strauss’s treatment of Oscar Wilde’s lusciously sensual tale has been described as alternating between an unhealthy fascination and a desire to burst into ribald laughter.

Unsurprising, as Adena Jacobs’s zanily contrived production fails the fascination test and overplays the comedy. Yet the sexual obsession of the Princess Salome for the imprisoned John the Baptist — here Jokanaan — and her grotesque revenge for his rejection of her advances, finally kissing the lips of his severed head, has never been a bundle of laughs.

Until now, that is. Her stepfather’s court resembles a demented child’s playground with Herod as a clownish Father Christmas figure who desperately fishes gifts from his sack for Salome in an attempt to dissuade her from demanding the head on a silver platter in repayment for her famous dance before him.

That erotic dance is more like a stroll around the stage by Allison Cook’s androgynous Salome. Finally she is relieved by four gyrating pelvic-thrusting girls like something out of a music video.

If they are to understand the intellectual interpretive straitjacket Jacobs has imposed upon the opera, audiences would be advised to get there early and read the programme essay The Horror of Blind Obsession. They may then possibly appreciate why the opening scene is played in semi-darkness with a line of indiscernible singers.

Poor Martyn Brabbins conducts Strauss’s score bravely as the music fights with what is going on onstage.

Avoid.

Runs until October 23, box office eno.org.