Stage: Head on a platter

Salomé
conceived, directed, choreographed by Carmine De Amicis, Harriet Waghorn
music Phillip O'Meara
with Carmine De Amicis, Fabio Dolce, Harriet Waghorn, Jade Woodhouse, Mikey Sluman, Victoria Marsh
Cockpit Theatre, London, 23.Jun.19 • National Tour, 24.May-30.Jun.19

Originally published in 1891, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé is based on the biblical account of King Herod, his step-daughter Salomé and their fateful encounter with the Jewish prophet Jokanaan, aka John the Baptist. Edifice Dance Theatre strips this back to its essentials as a collision between divinity, wealth and power. It's a strikingly powerful piece of work, beautifully staged and performed with a riveting sense of passion, energy and urgency.

Performed in the round on a stage strewn with mannequin parts around a central table, Jokanaan (De Amicis) deftly dances without hitting any of the pieces, expressing pure power and grace. He's followed by the increasingly annoyed Herod (Dolce), who is accompanied by his own three-piece orchestra (Woodhouse, Sluman, Marsh) as he dances stumbling through the set, arresting Johanaan like a jealous fanboy. Enter the spoiled princess Salomé (Waghorn), fending off the handsy admiration of her step-father. She's far more interested in the prisoner. But when he rebuffs her kiss, she turns back to Herod, agreeing to perform a dance for him if he grants her one grisly wish.

The production is deceptively simple, with a pulsing combination of light and music that focusses all of the attention on these three gifted dancers. Dolce has a smirking presence as the man who thinks he has all of the power, doing his little jazz moves and ordering people around. By contrast, De Amicis uses long lines and achingly languid shapes to convey Jakonaan's effortless connection with the divine. Between them, Waghorn brings astonishing strength, a forceful woman who knows what she wants and has every intention of getting it one way or another. The physicality between them is staggering, especially in the final sequence.

Yes, the way this story is told offers strong echoes of the Time's Up movement, plus an underlying comment on how the people who hold positions of power are often in it for what they can get rather than what they can offer. Watching the balance shift between these three people is riveting, especially at such close quarters with the performers interacting with the audience (Waghorn handed me her mask, and I felt a spray of sweat at one point). This is a fiercely inventive retelling of an iconic story that deserves to run and run.

Critical Week: Eek! A mouse!

London critics caught up this week with the clever black comedy Life of Crime, based on an Elmore Leonard novel and starring Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def). It's offbeat and very funny, but not quite as hilarious as the week's biggest movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, a riotously entertaining sidestep in the Marvel universe that may be the comic studio's best film yet.

Other high-profile films this week included Dwayne Johnson and Brett Ratner's new take on Hercules, a surprisingly enjoyable adventure that's a lot smarter than it looks. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman's final performances lifts the slow-burning political thriller A Most Wanted Man into something rather amazing. And random cast members from a range of the previous four films are back for Step Up: All In, another corny story punctuated by great dance numbers.

Further afield, we had the terrific small-town drama Tiger Orange, about estranged brothers who both happen to be gay. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden is a riveting documentary about a shocking event from the early 1930s. You'll want to read more about it, and hopefully someone will make a dramatic thriller. And Al Pacino offered two movies: Salome is his film of his recent staging of the scandalous Oscar Wilde play, while Wilde Salome documents the process of doing the play and film, as well as tracing Wilde's life. The mesmerising staging of Salome is oddly stilted and over-the-top at the same time, with Jessica Chastain riveting in the title role. The doc is even more interesting, a bit padded out but packed with remarkable observations.

This coming week we'll be subjected to Sylvester Stallone and crew in The Expendables III, Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover, Nat Wolff and Selena Gomez in Behaving Badly, the indie drama 4 Minute Mile, Leo Leigh's ping pong hustler doc Fact or Fiction, the episodic architectural doc Cathedrals of Culture, Agnes B's road movie My Name is Hmmm, and Secret Cinema's immersive Back to the Future event.