Credit belongs equally to a new translation by Joseph Donohue, to imaginative staging by Father David Cregan and some captivating acting. A production by Villanova University reveals Wilde’s play to be mesmerizing theater. Those disparagements can now be dismissed. Why stage Salome at all?” Ben Brantley in the Times wrote, “How can you deliver dramatic moments like Salome’s kissing the decapitated head of John the Baptist without inviting hoots?” Its only Broadway production, in 2003 with Al Pacino, was roundly denounced.Ĭlive Barnes in the New York Post said “The play is extraordinarily bad. Oscar Wilde’s play Salome has not gotten much respect. Premier of a new translation by Joseph Donohue at Villanova Theatre, 2014 The religiously motivated censoring of Salome demonstrates how Wilde’s play was rejected by the dominant culture and is reflective of its place in the larger Decadent movement of its time.Salome. The Examiner of Plays described the production as “half-biblical, half-pornographic” for the lustful actions of several characters. Salome is no exception: Wilde’s play, as a retelling of the biblical story of the execution of John the Baptist with perverse and erotic twists, was immediately crossing a cultural line. In addition, Wilde was a seminal figure in the late-Victorian Decadent movement that rejected moral evaluations of art, revelled in the taboo, the perverse, and the excess, and railed against the dominant culture through these themes. Though by the fin-de-siècle Christianity’s dominance in Victorian England was weakening, the religion remained institutionally powerful. That Salome’s debut production was shut down due to censorship is hardly surprising. The play would eventually be published in France in 1893, and translated to English with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in 1894. However, the London Examiner of Plays censored the production before it premiered on the basis that it represented biblical figures in perverse and erotic contexts.

The production had a promising start: Wilde had recently found success as a playwright with the production of his society comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in February of that year, and the internationally celebrated actress (and Wilde’s personal friend) Sarah Bernhardt had agreed to fill the leading role.

Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salome was originally intended to debut at the Palace Theatre in London in 1892.

Salome play