“Sex has the power to move the world, love it and destroy it. And that power is called Salomé,” says theater director Magüi Mira, who is now bringing to the stage at the Goya Theater a humanized and free version of the great biblical character, the princess whose overwhelming desire led her to ask for the head of the Baptist. After the premiere at the Mérida Festival, Belén Rueda once again gives life on stage to this woman, an expression of absolute sensual power whose desire ends up turning into death.
Magüi Mira has rewritten the story to turn it into a look at the drug that represents power, which can be exercised, he highlights, with weapons and drones, but also with words and seduction. And also transform it into a song to the freedom of both women and oppressed peoples in its staging, which combines drama with humor.
And, the director recalls, in the first years of the first century the Romans continued to invade the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. They place monarchs and savage dictators to subjugate their people. On that trajectory they arrive in Judea. And there a princess, Salome, secretly supports the rebels who resist the government of King Herod Antipas, a corrupt puppet appointed by Rome. A man without morals, portrayed as a stupid whore, who rules without law.
John the Baptist – played by Pablo Puyol, a great musical actor who will also sing here –, spiritual leader of his people, shouts against the invader and is discarnated as a captive in the prison of Herod’s palace, who does not kill him for fear of the people. . He gives his life for what he believes will be a new time. He considers himself a prophet. And he says that hope is the breath of all dreams. A man of integrity who will end up igniting the princess’s desire. Of a Salomé who, lost in the head of her loved one, suffers. And she, rejected by him, unable to believe that the princess wants to free the people and suspecting that she may be the mere whim of a royal woman, will end up transformed into a bleeding woman.
Love and death, Mira says, live in a permanent embrace, and Salomé will break the red line that leads her to delirium. A territory conducive to the revenge of the princess’s own mother, Queen Herodias, played by Luisa Martín. A woman used and abused by power who stumbles in a land of repression that stones women if they abandon strict morals. She drags herself through an impossible life wrapped in sex, alcohol and ravings, shown alongside her second husband, Herod Antipas, like operetta kings.
Resentful of the Baptist for having declared her marriage to the monarch, stepbrother of her first husband, still alive and father of Salome, illegal according to Jewish law, Herodias will induce Salome to ask her stepfather the king after the famous dance of the seven. veils – which will be marked by Belén Rueda – the head of the Baptist served on a tray, an image immortalized in a thousand paintings, operas and works as a metaphor for the tragic power of passions.
