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Beardsley drawings kick off the Guy Fawkes Night entertainment. Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) strolls into a brothel, is congratulated on the success of Lady Windermere's Fan, trumpets his "disgustingly creative" mojo, and settles in for a clandestine production of Salome. An understanding of DeMille's satirical wit colors the little whorehouse stage turned into the Judea palace swarming with slumming divas and gossipy centurions and half-dressed odalisques, a cardboard moon plays barometer from chaste white to bloody red. The owner (Stratford Johns) fills out Herod's toga, Sarah Bernhardt's rival (Glenda Jackson) plays the irked Queen, Lord Douglas (Douglas Hodge) dons loincloth as John the Baptist. Then there's the mousy chambermaid who blooms under the proscenium as a lip-smacking Salome (Imogen Millais-Scott), spiky headgear and lopsided grin and motorized hips, the Wicked Maria from Metropolis ca. 1892. "Get back, daughter of Sodom!" Ken Russell behind the camera keeps the Babylonian tackiness of the mise en scène swirling, in front of it he dons bogus beard and tripod as a boisterous stagehand. Gassy jokes, rabbinical dwarfs, the dildo at the tip of the spear. "In the Hall of the Mountain King" for the dance, with a hermaphroditic flash as the seventh veil drops. The holy mouth that will not be kissed, down the elevator goes the Nubian swordsman and up comes the severed Pre-Raphaelite noggin on a silver platter. (Rather distracted by a pageboy painted gold, Wilde is nevertheless duly moved.) "I'd hate to share a bill with Gilbert and Sullivan." A grisly coup de théâtre gooses the audience and summons the utterly unamused critical establishment, the director of The Devils can relate. With Denis Lill, Russell Lee Nash, Warren Saire, and Kenny Ireland.
--- Fernando F. Croce |