Well, well, this is a translation! Our – – – literature is enriched by it almost as by an original work, albeit by a work that should have been written in it, if we only had a Wilde. At any rate, it is now ours!Footnote 2
These words were written in 1906 by Yosef Haim Brenner, one of the leading figures of the young Hebrew literary scene and a cultural icon for early Zionism, in a letter to the translator Shmuel Perlman. Brenner was referring to a translation of Oscar Wilde's play Salomé (first published in French in 1893, and a year later in English translation), which Perlman – together with Avraham Robinson (and under the joint pseudonym A. Shefer) – was to publish in Hame'orer, a literary journal edited by Brenner in London that had immense influence on the emergence of modern Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perlman and Robinson's translation, published the following year, was the first translation of any Wilde play into Hebrew.Footnote 3 It is noteworthy that this translation was published not that long after the original play had been written – and in London, at a period when Salomé was still officially banned from the British stage by the Lord Chamberlain.Footnote 4
The word marked in the quotation above by the three dashes, between ‘Our’ and ‘literature’, is ‘Hebrew’ – written and then erased by Brenner.Footnote 5 This is only the first of several instances in this very short paragraph that put cultural and national ownership in quite a precarious position. While the paragraph ends with a triumphant ‘it is ours!’, the prior sentence in fact posits Salomé on the borderlines of Hebrew cultural identity: it should have been written in Hebrew in the first place – probably due to its historical subject matter, its Jewish characters, and the biblical influences on its language and imagery – but nevertheless it has the status of an ‘almost original’ work (Wilde might have appreciated the paradox). These are remarkable sentiments about a play that was originally written in French, a language foreign to Wilde, and then translated and retranslated into English, the playwright's main tongue.Footnote 6 If Salomé transgresses linguistic and national boundaries already in its original composition, how much more is this the case with a translation that is presented as a return to an ‘original’ language and culture in which the play was never written?Footnote 7
The notion of returning a play to an original language taps into wider concerns for Hebrew culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for the Zionist ideology that fostered it, for this culture imagined itself in many ways as a return to an origin: to an original land, the Land of Israel, from which the nation allegedly originated – as well as to an original language, Hebrew, that had lost and now was regaining its role as common vernacular.Footnote 8 The emerging Hebrew culture in Europe and Palestine was aimed at retrieving what was allegedly lost to the Jews in years of exile since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and by ‘returning’ Salomé to the Hebrew language, its translation seems to participate in this wider endeavour.Footnote 9
Or – if we follow Brenner's words – ‘almost’. For the act of claiming ownership over Salomé proved to be more precarious once attempts were made to realize it on the Hebrew-speaking stage. In theatrical performance, as I wish to demonstrate, questions of ownership become deeply intertwined with those of spectatorship – and Wilde himself unsettles both in his play. Among his strategies of doing so, one may find Wilde's own activations of ‘Judaism’.Footnote 10 At the same time, this very same ‘Jewish’ presence was of course also part of Salomé’s appeal for Brenner and others in Hebrew culture – thus creating another paradox, in which the same elements that attracted members of Hebrew culture to Salomé also rendered the play elusive to claims of ownership. In the next section, I will trace Wilde's engagements with ‘Judaism’ as he handles spectatorship in the play, while in the sections that follow I move to examine Salomé’s theatrical reception in Israel and the ways in which the dynamics of seeing and not seeing permeate its local political and cultural resonance.
‘Judaism’, the Song of Songs, and the displacement of sight in Salomé
The play takes place in ancient Judaea, at the end of the Second Temple period and around the time that Jesus started gaining his followers. John the Baptist (called Jokanaan in the play) is imprisoned by Herod, the tetrarch of Judaea, but Herod's stepdaughter, Salomé, hears his voice as he prophesies and demands to see him. Laying eyes on him incites desire in Salomé but he rejects her advances. Herod, himself infatuated with his stepdaughter, asks her to dance for him and she agrees to do so if he gives her whatever she asks. After she dances the Dance of the Seven Veils in front of Herod, she demands Jokanaan's head to be brought to her in a silver charger in return. The horrified Herod tries to convince Salomé to change her mind, but she refuses and Jokanaan is beheaded. The play ends with Salomé holding Jokanaan's severed head and speaking words of love to it, while Herod commands her death.
Salomé is a play famously occupied with seeing and looking.Footnote 11 In it, spectatorship is closely intertwined with ownership: Salomé’s yearning to see Jokanaan leads her to wish to touch him – and when he refuses, to demand his head, as an object to be had. Similarly, her dance in front of Herod is part of a transaction: she gives him something to see, and he gives her something in return. However, seeing, and therefore also owning, are never simple feats in the play. Already the play's first scene displaces sight and draws the audience to look at people who look at other people (who look at other people), whom the audience does not see: the play starts with a group of soldiers, servants and other attendants looking at Salomé and at Herod, who is staring at Salomé, both of whom are offstage, and describing the two to each other.Footnote 12 For the audience, verbal description is supposed to compensate for visual absence – yet this absence is glaring in the first scene, as words seem to envelop a void, a visual lack, something unseen.
Yet even when the audience does supposedly see whatever is presented onstage, verbal description nevertheless seeks to mediate the seen as well – and often disrupt it. In the most notable example, Salomé gives contrasting images of Jokanaan's body, which is present onstage as she speaks. His body is ‘white like the lilies of the field’ at one moment and, after Jokanaan rejects her advances, is ‘a plastered wall where vipers have crawled’. His hair is first ‘like clusters of grapes’ and then horrible ‘like a knot of black serpents writhing round thy neck’.Footnote 13 The body that is present and seen onstage clearly cannot be simply conflated with the words describing it, uttered by the woman looking at it. Salomé’s words are constantly at odds with the audience's gaze, creating duplicity within the act of spectatorship, driving a wedge between what we see and what we are verbally told we are supposed to see or called to imagine that we have seen.Footnote 14
This tension between sight and verbal description has been attributed by scholars to several influences, such as the use of ekphrasis in Huysmans's À rebours, the poetic tradition of the blazon, Mallarmé’s Hérodiade, and Plato's impact on Wilde.Footnote 15 Yet there is another possible source for this idiosyncratic theatrical structure and one that is manifestly dominant in Salomé: the Song of Songs. The erotic love song, or anthology of songs, in the Hebrew Bible is rife with imagery of flora, fauna and landscape used to verbally describe the lovers’ bodies and the desired sexual act:
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from mount Gilead . . . Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks . . . Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.Footnote 16
The Song of Songs is clearly apparent in the similes used by Salomé in her speeches to Jokanaan, as well as in Herod's description of Salomé’s dove-like and flower-like feet.Footnote 17 William Tydeman and Steven Price even suggest that the play was written under the impact of a theatrical dramatization of the Song in 1891, at the Théâtre d'Art in Paris.Footnote 18 Indeed, Salomé too can be seen as a theatricalization, embodied and spatialized, of the Song's structures of seeing and describing.
As much as the Song puts energy into describing bodies with abundant imagery, its unexpected effect is that the body described becomes unseen: in some cases, of course, the body of the lover is absent even in the narrative of the Song – such as the sequence in 5:10–16 in which the descriptions of the male lover are given after he himself had vanished in 5:6 and cannot be found. But even in other cases, in which the described body might be present during the act of description, the readers of the Song of Songs – like the audience of Salomé – witness characters looking at bodies, rather than actually seeing said bodies. The reader of the biblical text, following these images, ultimately has no idea how any of the lovers look. The images are so poetic, so dense and hyperbolic, that they in fact obscure sight. The Song is a text of desire and yearning, rather than of consummation and fulfilment, and as such the body is never there to be had, can never be fully owned. Consequently, sight in the Song of Songs, as in Salomé, is always somewhat displaced.
At times, Wilde fully realizes this interplay between displaced sight, desire and verbal similes elaborated in the Song – most poignantly in Salomé’s final speech to the severed head of Jokanaan: ‘Thy body was a column of ivory set on a silver socket’, she says – but the torso she speaks of, now described in the past tense, is painfully absent from the stage at this moment.Footnote 19 At other times, however, the echoes of the Song in the play prove to be more theatrically challenging. For as opposed to the written text of the Song, where the reader gets only verbal descriptions of the looked-at body but not the body itself, on the stage of Salomé the body is often present to be looked at. And yet, as mentioned above, it also is put at odds with verbal similes. Wilde, in this sense, further radicalizes the Song of Songs’ displacement of sight and wishes to push it into the more precarious terrain of theatrical performance in which the body is in fact visible onstage, while still driving the same wedge between bodies and words and between seen and unseen.
In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the erotic desire in the Song of Songs was interpreted allegorically to signify the religious yearning between humans (whether individuals or communities) and the divine. In a recent study, Jonathan Kaplan traced how rabbinic interpretations of the Song sought to stress the notion of God's presence at times of exile – even in the face of the Song's underlying motifs of ‘absence, longing, and pursuit’.Footnote 20 In Salomé, however, the Jews’ experience of God's presence is far more sombre, and returns again to questions of spectatorship and ownership.
Wilde's relation to Jews and Judaism both in and beyond the context of Salomé has been the subject of much scholarly debate in recent years.Footnote 21 While S. I. Salamensky places the play within the context of what she calls in one article Wilde's ‘Jewish problem’, and in another version of it – more forthrightly – his ‘anti-Semitism’, Nicholas Mirzoeff has shown that Wilde also perceived affinities between the Jews and his own marginal position as an Irishman and a queer man.Footnote 22 Ambivalent about Judaism as Wilde might have been, his perception of what Judaism is informed much of the unique construction of theatre and spectatorship in Salomé.
The Jews, according to the First Soldier at the beginning of Salomé, ‘only believe in things that you cannot see’ – to which the Cappadocian replies, ‘That seems to me altogether ridiculous’.Footnote 23 Wilde relies here on a long-held stereotype of Judaism and Jews as inherently averse to the visual – a stereotype that was alternately promoted and refuted by Jews and non-Jews, anti- and philo-Semites alike.Footnote 24 While the reality of Jewish attitudes to the visual is obviously far more complex, this image held sway over the Western imagination for a long period, and also shaped Wilde's treatment of the Jews in this play.Footnote 25 However, the First Soldier's generalizing statement about the Jews is put into tension with the Jews’ own deliberations on the matter later on in the play, which suggest that the Jewish belief in the unseen may in fact be more multifaceted even in Wilde's eyes. Following a statement by Herod that Jokanaan had seen God, the Jews debate:
A JEW: That cannot be. There is no man who hath seen God since the prophet Elias . . . In these days God doth not show Himself. He hideth Himself. Therefore great evils have come upon the land.
ANOTHER JEW: Verily, no man knoweth if Elias the prophet did indeed see God. Peradventure it was but the shadow of God that he saw.
A THIRD JEW: God is at no time hidden. He showeth Himself at all times and in everything. God is in what is evil, even as he is in what is good. . . .
A FIFTH JEW: No one can tell how God worketh. His ways are very mysterious. It may be that the things that we call evil are good, and that the things which we call good are evil. There is no knowledge of anything. We must needs submit to everything, for God is very strong. He breaketh in pieces the strong together with the weak, for he regardeth not any man.Footnote 26
Salamensky compellingly reads this scene as intending to present the Jews’ theological disputes as mere prattle, but there is more to it than meets the eye.Footnote 27 It is important to note here that while the Jews agree that God currently remains unseen, they hardly agree that God has no physical or visual existence. In fact, according to the first and second Jews, God has a face – but one that only appeared in another time (it could have been seen in the past, but not now) or also in another place (there is a face somewhere else, yet one could only see its shadow). For the Third Jew, the unseen God still appears today – not directly but through the visible world, while the Fifth Jew grimly focuses on its appearance through terrible violence (on this the Jews seem to agree). Even though the Second Temple has not yet been destroyed as the events depicted in the play take place, the sensibility that the Jews display here is profoundly exilic – they are not yet displaced from the land, but the sight of God has been displaced from reality.Footnote 28 Rather than an invisible God, the Jews present a God the sight of which is always out of joint: an unseen that is suggested by the seen, and a seen world of which the interpretation, as a result, is always slippery. Importantly, the Jews’ inability to see God directly is presented in Salomé as tantamount to their inability to know its ways; that is, to claim ownership upon it. In this sense, the exilic sensibility of the Jews in the play correlates to the yearning dynamics of the Song of Songs: neither can make claims to seeing (whether God or a beloved's body) and therefore also not to owning.
In its mock Talmudism, this scene thus presents a polyphony of views regarding a concern that is profoundly central to Wilde's play – a play that is in itself a polyphonic meditation, with implications that are theatrical no less than theological, about the tensions between the seen and the unseen. After all, Wilde called the Dance of the Seven Veils – in which the body is seemingly the most exposed to the spectators’ gaze – an ‘invisible’ dance.Footnote 29 The tensions between seen and unseen, and the implications of these tensions, are hardly settled for the Jews, nor are they in the theatre of Salomé.
In his theatricalization of the Song of Songs and through his perception of Judaism as a culture that problematizes spectatorship, Wilde therefore establishes a dramaturgy and a staging that frames theatre as a space of displaced sight, a place that entices us to make claims of ownership over what we see only to simultaneously undercut it. Ironically, it is exactly this ‘Jewish’ presence, undermining spectatorship and ownership, that prompted claims of ownership made of (and, as we will now see, also through) Salomé in Israeli culture.Footnote 30 In the following sections of this paper, I will trace the reception of Salomé in Israeli theatre by exploring how two artists – a translator and a theatre director – responded in two different periods to the play, and engaged with the contested questions of national–cultural ownership that arise from it in a local context.
Authenticating Salomé: Pinchas Sadeh
Salomé was first staged in Israel in 1982 at Habimah Theatre, directed by Michael Gurevitch. This production was based on a new translation of the play by Israeli writer Pinchas Sadeh. A prominent novelist and poet on the Israeli literary scene, Sadeh's work is characterized by a deeply religious–existential tone, quite uncommon in Hebrew literature at the time and fundamental to his decision to translate Salomé.Footnote 31 In a radio interview conducted following the play's premiere, Sadeh related that he first became acquainted with Wilde's play through the translation published by Brenner in a journal that, in the words of Sadeh, was devoted to ‘reviving the soul of the [Jewish] nation’.Footnote 32 Brenner, as presented by Sadeh, was ‘the greatest Hebrew writer among our artists. He was a man of truth . . . He was a puritan person, and I mention this while recalling that Wilde was no puritan’. Sadeh therefore found it striking that ‘in the only existing Hebrew journal in the world, which was devoted to almost desperate spiritual goals’, Brenner found a place to publish a play by Wilde.
Brenner, perceived by Sadeh through his own spiritual–existential lens, serves to redeem Salomé from its own Wilde-ness. Sadeh claims that ‘it is clear that Brenner was not interested in aestheticism and playfulness and such things. It is clear that he heard a strong, loud voice emerging from the play itself’, an authentic cry that erupts through the Wildean artificial mask. Sadeh admits he was surprised that someone like Wilde wrote such a play, but insists that Salomé is not a Decadent play:
In my eyes it is not a Symbolist play, not Decadent, not fin-de-siècle. Heaven forbid, in my eyes, that we liken it to those illustrations drawn by Beardsley. Decadent stuff, or perverted stuff. In my eyes there is no connection to that. This is a historical Israeli play, which takes place – and this I saw from the very first moment – takes place on a moonlit night, on the shores of the Dead Sea in the Land of Israel, between the Mountains of Moab and the Mountains of Judea.Footnote 33
In order to exonerate Salomé from Wilde's decadence and other ‘perversions’, Sadeh has to legitimize it through the ‘puritan’ Brenner. But even more so, for Sadeh Salomé remarkably becomes an Israeli play, embedded in the local landscape. The interviewer observed that Sadeh called Salomé ‘an Israeli play’ rather than a play about Israel, and Sadeh confirms,
Yes, its protagonists are Israeli, its landscape is Israeli. Do not forget: Israeli history has great expressions: the Bible, Psalms, and others. It does not have, it never had, a Sophocles, a Shakespeare. It does not have that history. It does not have its Oedipus, its Macbeth, so what does it have? The greatest thing there is, and it is odd that an Irishman wrote this, a citizen of London, whatever his other qualities might be, but it is a fact, and it is the greatest play that exists.
This is not the first time in the history of Hebrew and Israeli theatre in which a Western play is ‘Hebraized’ in order to fill the lack of classical drama in Hebrew, the absence of Sophocles and Shakespeare.Footnote 34 However, this claim of ownership is far more difficult to accomplish with Wilde, as is apparent in Sadeh's struggles to save Salomé from Wilde – ‘whatever his other qualities might be’: aestheticist, decadent, possibly queer – and turn the play into an Israeli one.
Israelizing Salomé has very much to do with setting it in place. ‘From the very first moment’ Sadeh sees a landscape, and a local one at that: the Dead Sea by moonlight, the mountains of Moab and Judea. But what is the relation between the landscape that Sadeh immediately sees and what Wilde wishes us to see in Salomé? Strikingly, Wilde's stage directions make no mention of the mountains of Moab and Judea that Sadeh saw – or of any landscape outside of the palace for that matter. They just mention the ‘great terrace in the palace of Herod, set above the banqueting-hall’, a staircase, an ‘old cistern surrounded by a wall of green bronze’, and moonlight.Footnote 35 Wilde's directions point purely at architecture, with hardly any natural landscape. Sadeh's translation of the opening stage directions, however, adds that the ‘plot takes place at Machaerus fortress, the fortified palace of Herod Antipas, west of the Dead Sea’.Footnote 36 By adding the geographical location and the name of Machaerus, the historical fortress in present-day Jordan in which the execution of John the Baptist allegedly took place (according to Josephus in Antiquities 18:5), Sadeh wishes to cement the play in local geography and Jewish history. This is, of course, part of a far wider Zionist project of ‘returning’ stories to the territory in which they ‘really’ happened, and thus strengthening a Jewish sense of continuity and belonging to the land.Footnote 37 Pinpointing the play to a specific place, to a concrete landscape that can be seen and verified, assists Sadeh in saving Salomé from Wildean artifice: the play is authentic in the same manner that the historical landscape is.
Granted, the temptation to see a natural, concrete landscape is not without basis in Wilde's text. Moab and the mountains of Judea perhaps do not appear in Wilde's stage directions – but they do appear in the dialogue. Importantly, however, they are not mentioned as the geographical surroundings of the events, but rather as part of the dialogue's imagery: ‘It is like the vermilion that the Moabites find in the mines of Moab’, says Salomé about Jokanaan's red mouth. And of his body she says, ‘Thy body is white . . . like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and come down into the valleys’.Footnote 38 In other words, the landscape that Sadeh sees appears in Salomé – yet not as landscape, but as something else: as images of the body.
‘When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects,’ claims Wilde's mouthpiece Vivian in The Decay of Lying, happily staying at home and replacing nature with art.Footnote 39 In Salomé, Wilde remains true to this declaration, and turns landscape into verbal adornments for describing the body's beauty.Footnote 40 This is another tactic Wilde takes directly from the Song of Songs. Wilde uses the Song's tendency to describe the human body in similes taken from the natural landscape: gardens and vineyards, doves and gazelles, streams and mountains. This tendency gives the impression that the Song of Songs is a celebration of nature – but a close reading of the Song might suggest that it is in fact a very urban text, which fantasizes about nature but is never located in it. The harsh reality of the streets of Jerusalem in Song 5:7, in which the city guard violently beat the female protagonist as she runs in the streets at night to search for her male lover, and the lover's frustration in Song 8:1 that she cannot express her love in the streets without being subject to public scorn, both hint that all the wild escapades into nature where love can be finally consummated, such as in Song 7:12 (‘Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves’), are just dreamed of by those who are not located in the natural landscape at all and only yearn for it. In the meantime, they use the natural landscape in order to describe each other's bodies.Footnote 41 This is yet another of the many displacements taking place in the Song of Songs, in which the natural landscape is not an authentic place but an artistic device.
As in the Song, in Salomé landscape is but an image – and an elusive one at that – yet by pinpointing it, Sadeh wishes to turn it into the real thing. Ironically, when Sadeh claimed that he immediately ‘saw’ the Israeli landscape while reading Salomé, he did so via a text in which neither sight nor landscape can be taken at face value. Where Wilde creates duplicities, displacements and gaps, Sadeh is governed by the desire to locate, to see and to authenticate. Sadeh seeks unification between word and sight; between image and landscape; an actual place in which the plot (and, more generally, Jewish history) can undisturbedly settle.
Whatever Sadeh's view was of Salomé, the play's director, Michael Gurevitch – a generation younger than Sadeh – did not seem to share it. A far cry from Sadeh's biblical–pastoral image of the play, Gurevitch's stage exhibited an explicitly modernist design, covered with concrete and metal, with no direct reference to the Israeli landscape. Closer to Wilde than Sadeh was, the stage suggested urban architecture rather than mountains and sea. Perhaps the generational difference between translator and director resulted in that Gurevitch did not partake in Sadeh's enthusiasm for the natural landscape of the Land of Israel, especially at a period when younger artists in Israeli theatre became more and more critical of Zionist ideology.Footnote 42 However, it is unclear from remaining evidence whether Gurevitch wished to utilize the play's localism in order to critique or comment upon Israeliness in any manner – or even whether the fact that the plot took place in the Land of Israel mattered to him at all.
Likewise, critics duly noted the play's localism but did not consider this fact extremely meaningful. Instead, they focused on the play's aesthetics and lambasted the production as vulgar, tasteless, cumbersome and (as opposed to the images Sadeh saw in his mind) visually ugly.Footnote 43 In fact, some critics’ rhetoric registered the play as fundamentally foreign rather than local. Salomé, wrote theatre critic Boaz Evron, is ‘one of the most artificial and ostentatious fruits of the previous century's Decadence . . . the only way of dealing nowadays with such a dusty flower is by emphasizing its artificiality’.Footnote 44 Despite Sadeh's efforts, for Evron the play remains a piece of Wildean artifice – and one which Gurevitch failed to tackle because he lacked the required ironic distance from it. Furthermore, the play itself, according to Evron, simply has nothing to say to Israelis: ‘It is more distant from us than ancient Babylonia’. Speaking for a collective Israeliness, Evron does not see the play as part of the local ancient world, as Sadeh envisioned, but of a late Victorian London that is tellingly even more distant.
This distance from local culture is also maintained by the critics’ repeated comparison of the performance, surprisingly, to Yiddish theatre and culture. Shosh Weitz describes Rivka Gur in the role of Herodias as ‘a female haggler in a Yiddish play’, while Evron says she plays ‘like a yenta’ – the Yiddish term for an elderly, meddling woman. Eli Danker's performance in the role of Jokanaan reminded Weitz of the screeching dybbuk in An-sky's classic Yiddish play The Dybbuk, portraying traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe.Footnote 45 These references to Yiddish theatre and culture are telling, since Yiddish had come to symbolize Jewish diasporic existence in Israeli culture, and was ridiculed and marginalized by Zionist ideology as the language of exile.Footnote 46 Similarly, Yiddish theatre was often derided by the Israeli press of the time as an emblem of non-professional, ‘low’ theatre.Footnote 47 By reminding critics of the diasporic Yiddish past, rather than the ancient Israeli one, Salomé thus remained thoroughly displaced.
Disowning Salomé: Ofira Henig
It took more than twenty years before Salomé was staged in Israel (in yet another new translation, this time by Dori Parnes) in a manner that utilized its localism in order to engage with the Israeli geographical and political landscape. However, in contrast to Sadeh's vision of the play, the stance of this 2005 production, directed by Ofira Henig, towards the local landscape and its ideological framing was critical rather than celebratory.
The two decades between the Salomé productions saw drastic changes in Israeli society. While in the early 1980s, when Sadeh's translation was staged, Zionist ideology still held a strong grip on the mainstay of society, the 1990s brought forth what would become known as the ‘post-Zionist’ moment, in which Zionist nationalism was severely criticized, attempts were made to replace collective identity with neo-liberal individualism, and a glimpse of hope for peace with the Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations was enjoyed. However, the second Intifada (the Al-Aqsa Intifada) that erupted in the year 2000 and the violent events that followed put a de facto end to the Oslo peace process and drastically reduced the power and size of the Israeli left, as many left-leaning people felt disillusioned about prospects for peace. Israeli mainstream theatre, which was vehemently political, leftist and critical of Zionist ideology in the 1980s and 1990s, gradually began to shy away from political controversy, addressing a growing centre right audience rather than a shrinking left.Footnote 48 Thus, if Sadeh read Salomé just prior to the ‘post-Zionist’ moment in Israeli culture, Henig's production of the play arrived ‘post-post-Zionism’, when the prospects for peace were all but extinguished and nationalist currents were increasingly taking centre stage in Israeli public discourse.
Henig, one of the most prominent and politically controversial directors in contemporary Israeli theatre, directed her Salomé at the Lab, an experimental theatre venue located in Jerusalem.Footnote 49 Henig started her directorial career in the mainstream of Israeli theatre, as the resident director of Habimah Theatre between 1989 and 1993 and then as the artistic director of the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem (1996–2001) and of the Israel Festival (2001–4). Gradually, however, she began to direct in more fringe venues – due to both her increasingly experimental theatrical language and her outspoken left-wing political views, which were less and less accepted by the Israeli public. Her production of Salomé, which marked the beginning of her term as artistic director of the avant-garde Lab theatre, can be seen as an important station in this gradual shift from the Israeli liberal centre in the 1990s to a more fraught position at the beginning of the new century, radically challenging the Israeli theatre field – both politically and aesthetically – from its outskirts.
The cast of Salomé, as is the case in many of Henig's later productions, comprised an ethnically and religiously diverse ensemble, including Palestinian actors for the roles of Herod and Salomé (Khalifa Natour and Clara Khoury respectively); a Jewish Orthodox rabbi and actor as Jokanaan (Baruch Brenner); and a Jewish secular actress in the role of Herodias (Gili ben-Ozilio). While the actors were not cast along clear national or religious lines that would make the production a simplistic allegory for Israeli–Palestinian relations, the co-presence of Israeli and Arab actors onstage highlighted the plot's local resonance. This was further emphasized by Jokanaan's prophecies of doom in the play, and Herod's forebodings that ‘some terrible thing will befall’, turning the whole production into an ominous warning of an upcoming regional catastrophe.Footnote 50 Old television sets broadcast silent images of explosions – that for the audience could evoke local terrorist attacks or the relatively recent 9/11 events – alongside apocalyptic texts from the Old and New Testaments. Whenever Jokanaan spoke his prophetic words, the other characters, addressees of his disastrous visions, began itching frantically as if afflicted by boils – a bodily expression of a social miasma. A leitmotif in the play's soundtrack was Bloodhound Gang's ‘Fire Water Burn’, and its recurring words (‘The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. / We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn. / Burn, motherfucker! Burn!’) strengthened the image of a society at the brink of destruction, sunk in moral degradation and wilfully oblivious to its approaching demise.Footnote 51
The production walked a thin line between placement and displacement: the opening discussion between the soldiers about the Jews causing an uproar offstage while they are quarrelling about their religion echoed the real-life religious disputes between Jews and non-Jews, and between various groups within Israeli Jewish society, raging outside the theatre in the streets of Jerusalem, thus giving the feeling that the play was ‘in place’. And yet this feeling was dismantled by the stage's eclectic and multifocal design. Various elements were scattered about: a ladder, sofas, a broken doll, torn papers. At the centre of the stage stood a rubber pool, perhaps reminiscent of the Sea of Galilee or the Dead Sea, surrounded by small wooden camels. Such camels would be well known to local audiences as the sort sold to tourists in Old Jerusalem and elsewhere. The bright azure colour of the pool's plastic alongside these camels combined into an image of the Israeli landscape as commodified and fabricated. The moon was painted on the wall at the beginning of the performance by the actor portraying the Page of Herodias (Palestinian actor and playwright Taher Najib) and erased at the play's conclusion. Like the Israeli landscape (and like the landscape in the Song of Songs) it was exposed as artificial rather than natural.
As such, the production underscored the ways in which aspects of Wilde's world view – an insistence that life mimics art; a fascination with artifice, surfaces and the performativity of identity – had, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, become postmodern maxims. Henig utilized these in order to highlight the degree to which Israeli reality and landscape are in themselves mediatized, constructed and performed. Thus, by seemingly realizing Sadeh's desire to ‘see’ the Israeli landscape even more than Gurevitch had (and in this sense moving away from Wilde's original stage directions), Henig only frustrates it: while Sadeh was enthralled by Salomé’s promise of return to an authentic local landscape, Henig alienates this very landscape and exposes it as artifice, a touristic orientalist cliché rather than an authentic, naturally given homeland.Footnote 52
Furthermore, if, in Wilde's play, spectatorship is intertwined with ownership, then Henig undermines Israeli claims of ownership over landscape by heightening the theatricality and dismantling the authenticity of the landscape seen by the audience. She achieves the same with claims of ownership over the play itself (Brenner's ‘ours’). The casting undoes any sense of Israeli-Jewish collective ‘we’: having an Orthodox rabbi playing John the Baptist, and a Palestinian actor the princess of Judaea, creates a decentring of national history. Tellingly, the cast also brought to the Lab theatre Arab audiences from East Jerusalem, who rarely frequent the theatrical establishments of West Jerusalem. The allegedly innate bond between bodies, identities and ownership over historical narrative was being unravelled – celebrating multiplicity and multifocality instead.
At the centre of this unravelling of sight and ownership stood Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils. The dance, conducted in front of Natour's neurotic Herod and the rest of the cast, was accompanied by a Turkish song performed by a local Jerusalemite singer. Khoury was dressed in a man's suit for the dance, and performed it with a mixture of defiance, mockery of stereotypical striptease movements, and genuine trauma – exposing Salomé’s vulnerability at this moment as well as her strength. While she took off some articles of her clothing, the dance ended without the audience being able to ‘see’ anything: the final act of the dance had Salomé shoving a large stone into her underpants and using it to pull them down, then setting the stone in defiance on the ground, but the long shirt she was still wearing covered her private parts and thus denied satisfaction to Herod's male gaze and the audience's scopophilia.
As noted above, Wilde referred to Salomé’s dance as ‘invisible’. Indeed, in Wilde's play, the dance occupies a peculiar place on the threshold between the seen and the unseen. In stark contrast to the overabundant verbal descriptions of the body that ultimately unsettle the body's visibility in the rest of the play, Salomé’s dance is described by Wilde in notoriously laconic – even ‘irresponsible’ – stage directions: ‘Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils’.Footnote 53 While these directions render the dance entirely inscrutable for the reader of the play, they seem to imply that for spectators the physical dancing body of Salomé should become even more present, unobscured by verbal descriptions as other bodies in the play are. However, as Chad Bennett maintains, this has hardly proved simple for stage productions of the play to interpret, and Henig certainly plays on the tension between visibility and invisibility in Salomé’s dance.Footnote 54
In Henig's production, this tension is framed in the context of violence – both sexual and political. Alongside Salomé’s clear strength and defiance as she performs the Dance of the Seven Veils, the anguish registered on her face at some moments as she undresses – including right before taking off her underpants – made it clear that the dance itself is an act of sexual violence enacted upon her, entangled in the web of violent acts committed upon Salomé and by her upon others. The stone that she uses for pulling down her underpants is also an object politically charged with violence, pain and defiance in the local context – taken directly from the contested land on the material level, as well as a symbol of political resistance in post-Intifada Israel and Palestine, due to the iconic act of stone throwing.
The fact that the violence of Salomé’s final unveiling remains unseen is remarkable in a production in which everything – including terrorism and destruction – is being visualized and mediatized, through the television sets onstage. In a culture in which violence and pain are very much exposed to the public eye, Henig keeps this crucial moment of violence and pain on the cusp of visibility. As opposed to the mediatized, televised violence that is screened onstage, there is another kind of violence that eludes spectatorship – and therefore also evades ownership, both theatrically and politically. This is the ultimate, and most menacing, displacement of sight in Henig's production. It implies that the violence that envelopes the unseen – whether that is Salomé’s ‘invisible’ dance or the divine wrath that, according to the Jews in the play, reveals the presence of their invisible God – is perhaps also the most dangerous violence, elusive yet with most palpable consequences. This is a pertinent point in a land plagued by political and religious violence surrounding an invisible God, yet by keeping her spectators at the threshold of the unseen, Henig seems to prompt them to acknowledge their inability to fully grasp, or own, the violence they are witnessing.
Conclusion: Salomé’s trap
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza speaks of Salomé’s fundamental homelessness as a play that is situated between languages and identities, both sexual and national.Footnote 55 Yosef Haim Brenner and Pinchas Sadeh both attempted to bring Salomé ‘back home’ – or at least to what they considered to be their, and the play's, original home: Hebrew language in Brenner's case, and the Land of Israel in Sadeh's. But among its many seductions, Salomé is ultimately a trap for Israeli culture, luring it with a promise of local landscape and history but in fact deeply engaged with displacement. Thus, in the guise of a promise for a Hebraic – even Zionist – ‘return’ it in fact dislodges any sense of home, as later becomes manifest in Henig's production.
In Brenner's letter to Salomé’s first Hebrew translator, the word ‘Hebrew’ is both asserted and erased. Indeed, Salomé’s future interventions in the fabric of Hebrew-Israeli national identity proved to be double-edged. Wilde's play eventually unsettles rather than affirms Israeli national claims, whether unwittingly (as in the case of Sadeh) or wittingly (as in the case of Henig). More than anything, the local reception of Salomé testifies to the precariousness of ownership, of seeing something – a body, a landscape, a play – and saying ‘ours’.
