Salome and My Seven Veils of Illusion

When I found out that my stage production of Salome was being remounted for the seventh time, I was dismayed. It had enjoyed great success when it was first presented by the Canadian Opera Company in 1996, but putting it back on its feet after almost 30 years seemed a bit of a stretch.

In the mid ’90s, the artistic director of the Canadian Opera Company had seen my film Exotica and thought that the subject matter of Salome would appeal to me, with its themes of frustrated desire, voyeurism and obsession. I had already seen Oscar Wilde’s play in a highly stylized production in the late ’80s. I have kept the program of Steven Berkoff’s show and was impressed by his lucid introduction to the play …

“Salomé was written in the 1890s as the great century was rolling out and venting its last rotting spews and from its ordurous compost grew forth the exotic flowers of the pre-Raphaelites and the curvilinear and sensual lines of the art nouveau. As if racing to complete the oeuvre before being beached on the virgin shore of the twentieth century, there was a frenzy of activity led by the outsize and over-talented Oscar, around whose feet danced the wicked imp Aubrey Beardsley whose brilliant pen and ink drawings captured the spirit of the time and are nothing less than perfect”

Berkoff’s playing and direction in this production were truly extraordinary, as he stretched out the intoxicating prose of Wilde’s lavish and heated language. He felt that the play had been scored with great “song-bursts of arias, plumes of multi-coloured and ornamental dialogue” and combined this with hypnotic and almost narcotically induced gestures and movements. I’m not sure what the legendary German director Max Reinhardt’s production was like, but the brilliant composer Richard Strauss was tremendously excited by what he saw on stage in Berlin in 1902. He was inspired to write the most radically sounding opera of his time. In his book The Rest is Noise, the great music critic Alex Ross defines Strauss’ Salome as the veritable starting point of 20th century music theatre. Its premiere in Graz in 1906 was attended by the likes of Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler. A critic wrote that nothing more “satanic and artistic” had ever been seen on the German stage.

As I listened to Salome in the months after the premiere of Exotica in Cannes in 1994, I became increasingly excited by its great dramatic possibilities. While Berkoff saw the play as a way of Wilde expressing his intoxication with the male body (“The language is hypnotic and narcotic as it woos you into oblivion with a lasso of perfumed words spun around your ears”), I saw in the play and the libretto of this radical opera the foundation of a disturbing psycho-drama of a highly dysfunctional family. Rather than set the opera in a lavishly designed biblical court (how most productions traditionally present the piece), my brilliant designer Derek McLane and I stripped it down and focused on the characters as they danced around each other in a hotbed atmosphere of suppressed sexual urgency. Yes, Salome dreams of kissing John the Baptist’s luscious red lips, but I was more drawn to the way King Herod was obsessed with his stepdaughter’s young body and the incestual undertones which drove him to the beheading of John so that Salome could fulfill her crazy wish.

There were many themes that this opera had in common with both Exotica and my film that came right after, The Sweet Hereafter. While both these works dealt with the trauma of abuse from a discreet and even mysterious way, Salome allowed me to reveal the more shocking and even sensational aspects of being victimized in such a violent manner. In this way, my production of Salome – even though it was a piece of live theatre – became intrinsically connected to these two other cinematic works. When I was told that the opera was being remounted after almost 30 years, it raised a lot of questions.

First of all, our societal attitude to the ways in which childhood trauma impacts people was now way more nuanced and evolved. What had seemed unexplored and completely open to overt investigation in the ’90s now seemed to require a completely different approach. While I remain fiercely proud of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, I wouldn’t make those films in the same manner today. The production of Salome, though, was a live presentation. Certainly, there were things that could be re-examined and shifted. The reality of a theatrical remount, however, means that there wouldn’t be the time or the budget to change anything in the set or the costumes.

In this way, the idea of my film Seven Veils began to emerge. If I couldn’t change anything about the production itself, I could create a character who could. Jeanine, played by Amanda Seyfried, is a woman who worked on the “original” production many years before, as an intern. She was a student of the imaginary director, an unseen character called Charles, and we gather that the two of them had an intense sexual affair during the production. Also, we come to understand that Charles was inspired by stories of Jeanine’s childhood and used these stories as the basis for certain parts of his artistic interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s story, transforming Jeanine’s childhood into a dark and nightmarish fairytale.

Without getting into the specifics of the plot, these characters and many others (the film is full of actual opera singers playing versions of themselves in the film) allowed me to recreate my production of 1996 and bring it into the present. In Seven Veils, we witness Amanda’s character becoming a version of Salome herself. While it has become something of a cliché to see characters suddenly confronted with unexpected triggers that send them reeling into past traumas, what interested me about Jeanine is that she seems fully aware of everything that’s happened in her past – as compared to most of the characters around her – but nevertheless the act of creatively confronting this material once again through the remount retraumatizes her in ways she could have never expected. Like Salome in the play, Jeanine tears away at the veils of control and domination to reveal her inner needs and desires.

It all culminates in the famous Dance of the Seven Veils. Was Oscar Wilde inspired by the Seven Veils of Illusion from the eastern philosophies that were making their way into European consciousness at the time? There is no question that there is something sublimely enlightening about performing this brave and outrageous act that her stepfather commands from her. And in a purely Wildean resolution (he was the writer who wrote the line “Nothing succeeds like excess”) she demands that her stepfather chop off John the Baptist’s head so that she can finally kiss his lips.

The beheading in my film happens in a radically different way, but it is as carefully choreographed and “directed” by Jeanine and similarly opens a path towards some sense of self-realization. Rather than Wilde’s enormous and obscene gesture, Jeanine performs a more discreet and understated “beheading,” which is nevertheless just as powerful and redeeming. As we hear the strains of the operatic Salome sing that “the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death,” we see Jeanine return to her childhood home. But Salome’s words are suddenly ripped from the opera and we only hear Richard Strauss’s glorious music as she ascends the steps to her future life.

I have no doubt that Salome is one of Oscar Wilde’s most personal works, and this great writer’s world has left a huge impression on me. In one of Jeanine’s voiceovers, in an imaginary letter to her former lover Charles, she makes mention of “the most mysterious of mirrors.” This line from Wilde’s brilliant novel The Picture of Dorian Gray refers to the thing that allows us to leave our conscience aside and act according to our wishes, creating an overwhelming turmoil of the spirit. This is certainly a volatile and even operatic place to find oneself, but one where radical and healing change is possible.