SALOME'
First Show: 01/08/08 - Time: 21.30
Reply: 02/08/08
Location: Palazzo dei Congressi
Salomè
by Giampiero Cicciò and Marco Carroccio
Original Music by Giovanni Renzo
Production Taormina Arte - Molise Spettacoli
I like to think at Salome as a girl in love with John’s voice, with the Word (that heralds), not with John himself as in Wilde’s interpretation. I see the saint throwing a stone against the girl that want only to listen to the message of the impenetrable prophet dressed with camel’s hair who screams in the desert… but yet it’s not time for the compassionate Christ, to whom John can’t even undo his sandals’ strings, the Christ who defends the prostitutes too, who will bring all of us with him on the cross. (So now Salome will be driven away and offended).
Herodias is the incarnation of Vengeance. Like a witch she persuades Salome to ask the head of John the Baptist. Salome is a pawn (unaware of her teenage sensuality that troubles the mind of Herod). I will again diverge from Wilde who see the girl capable to kill willingly. I like the vision of Mark (when in the Gospel says that Herod Antipas traps John keeping him alive because he would be a dangerous supernatural creature) more than Matt’s one (according to him Herod would have killed him immediately but he feared the insurrection of the people that considered John a prophet).
Herod is a coward (but someone today would define him a man of honour), he is not able to backtrack, he is a regent who maintain stupid oaths, and for this reason John will be decapitated. He is a puppet in the hands of Herodias. He is a modern man who is not able to enjoy what he has: he lives in an elegant dump among object that don’t leave him alone (when he throws them away they turn back again). He is dressed up with glittering matting, he has precious rings, is is a kind of pontifex ante litteram, his throne stays among a reign of junks, useless tools, oddities that grows in number like a miracle. Every day there are new stuffs, always more elaborate food in even more golden holder, containers to throw away, to bury, to forget. Even the head of John will finish in a silver tray that will soon disappear among that tip made of errors and horrors. (We hope that Christ will soon arrive to eliminate the sins of the world).
The play is about the famous event of decapitation and draws inspiration from some more contemporary “prophets” like Pasolini, Carmelo Bene, Baudelaire, Munch: the engagement of an actor who face a topic like this cannot disregard them and other director (Mallarme, Klimt, Testori, Flaubert) who gave a literary echo to a character that in the New Testament appears and disappears in only two passages.
Giampierò Cicciò
Cast:
