L’Affaire Salomé

Petr Kolečko

THE SALOME CASE

(KAUZA SALOME)

M 2, F 2

The author was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s famous and scandalous play from the turn of 20th Century putting both Biblical characters – Salome and John the Baptist or Jochanaan – into the decadent world of late Victorian world, ironizing it, sending it up and using cleverly Christian quotes and references.

Kolečko updates the subject matter – Salome is sixteen, a daughter of an oil magnate, and can have anything she asks for, even a “tamed crocodile who could shit into a rubbish bin”. Her father Herodes is erotically obsessed with her and ready to fulfil all her desires. The only person Salome is unable to dazzle with her riches is Jochanaan, a homeless man suffering from apocalyptic visions and shouting Bible quotes from the rich man’s garden. Driven by a perverse whim, Salome asks to be “kissed” by the homeless man – but she is refused. Then she demands revenge: she wants Jochanaan’s head as a present that all her friends would envy her at her birthday party. Her father refuses at first but then – after the daughter makes sexual advances to him – changes his mind and obliges. But, perhaps because of bad conscience, he then beats his daughter to death. An epilogue closes the play in which both lovers smoke dope in heaven, repeating: “We are dead, it is so cool...”

The play that opened at the A Studio Rubín in Prague in May 2009 is a “wild, punk, underground yell with marked elements of contemporary, openly ‘in yer face’ aesthetics. It explores both language and situations to a maximum effect in order to depict the extreme dehumanisation and perversion of the nouveau riches post-November 1989 generation X and their children.” (V. Hulec).