Review: Salome (NI Opera) – no soap opera with its intense & macabre scenes of incarceration, lust, abuse & death
Opera is a form of slow-motion storytelling, with larger than life characters and their huge voices and big gestures injected into an over-the-top plot that inhabits an enormous stage. Richard Strauss’ Salome – based on Oscar Wilde’s play – adds horror into the mix, re-working and twisting the original twelve verse Bible story of the death of John the Baptist into something much more gruesome and depraved. The character of John – Jokanaan in the opera – is probably the …