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that is certainly Beardsley-esque in impact but also a co combination of Indian dance, kabuki and French mime. About a third of Wilde’s words remain. David Houghton’s scenario incorporates the capture of the prophet Jokanaan (played by Mr. Houghton himself) in the form of a human dove, descending languidly from the sky to be stripped of his feathers. Near-naked attendants in Herod’s palace tread solemnly through the auditorium in various shades of body paint, scattering the feathers as they go. Lindsay Kemp enters as Salomé at the top of a tall, multipurpose stairway to the accompanying tune of » La Paloma,«, garbed in a dazzling dress, his head covered in a riot panted green feathers. Salomés mother, Herodias, is a bald-headed Queen of the Night with huge, bare bosoms and, in the bitchy vocal delivery of The Incredible Orlando, an usnwerving contempt for Herod’s sexual interest in her winsome daughter. As in all Mr. Kemp’s work, there is a throbbing, persistent sexuality in almost everything that happens. This undercurrent comes to the fore with appropriately banal effect during Salome’s cabaret, which is really, on this occasion, the dance of the seven males. Mr. Kemp is ceremoniously stripped down to a spangled body-stocking that might have been worn by Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust spell. For five astonishing minutes, Mr. Kemp twirls flatfootedly on the spot, registering his usual facial expressions of hope, despair, panic and vulnerability. Although a mime earlier in the evening prefigures the beheading of Jakanaan, when Salomé actually demands the sacrifice on a silver salver, Jokanaan is led passively on and, having adopted a Saint Sebastian pose, is symbolically murdered by a flurry of spears. Wagner comes swelling up on the soundtrack as Herod orders the attendants to surround Salomé and crush her to death with mirrors. The music still plays while the Company take an elegiac, restrained curtain call. The show fills the Round House with colour, sound and movement in a way that only the Grand Magic Circus could rival. Mr. Kemp dominates the proceedings with his inimitable charm and muscular whimsy, enjoying strong support from Neil Caplan, Michael Matou and, as a strangely eccentric and lavishly attired Herod, Vladek Sheybal. Not a family show, perhaps, but one that should appeal to all London theatregoers in search of the bizarre and commitedly sensuous. (Michael Coveney, The Financial Times Tuesday, 22. 2. 1977)

the company

Over the years a number of companies have formed around Lindsay Kemp, only to dissolve, or partly dissolve, in the changing waters of theatrical i fortune. Each time a residue of experience remains, accumulating. Flowers first began in an Edinburgh basement ten years ago,

with actors drawn mainly from the streets, many words, and largely improvised scenes. Since then it has travelled widely changing slowly in structure and style, from night to night and performance to performance. In January 1974, it came to London, to the Bush Theatre, from where it moved, via the 1.C.A., the West End Regent Theatre, to New York’s Broadway. After another appearance in London, at the Collegiate, came a sensational year’s tour of Australia Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide where both the praise the condemnation were even more vigorous than usual. Flowers has been repeated often, but it is always new as the many people who have seen it ten or twenty times testify. Always in demand, and hailed as unique, it will probably have a permanent place in the Company’s repertoire. Salomé was first performed in New York, at the Fortune Theatre in East 4th Street, during a seven-month stay after Flowers’ Broadway run, and was highly acclaimed. In Sydney last year came an opportunity to mount a new enlarged version, which many critics found even more overwhelming than Flowers. In both Flowers and Salomé original texts have been used as springboards for a stage-event that lives purely by its own rules and on its own terms. Perspectives or images from other sources are brought in beacuse they resonate with those of Our Lady of the Flowers or Wilde’s Salomé. Over the years Lindsay Kemp has worked dedicatedly to improve the technique, physical and emotional, of this Company, and to heighten its unique unity of style a style developed in classwork and evolved in performance, of discipline and release, and of exaggeration towards simplicity. Working in a difficult area somewhere between dance and theatre, between the popular and the elitist, between most ready categories, the Company has up to now managed to survive unsubsidised no easy feat in today’s conditions. The present season at the Round House, which we have produced ouerselves, began with Mr. Punch’s Pantomime, a traditional pantomime that delighted young and old alike, and represented a major widening of artistic range. Artaud spoke of this ideal actors as » athletes of the senses « exploring the limits of experience, and through discipline presentint that experience in theatrical terms as a gift to the audience and as an invitation for them to go beyond themselves, even momentarily . ’. this is our fulfilment. (David Haughton)

lindsay kemp Lindsay Kemp is a descendant of William Kemp, Shakes speare's clown, and, like his ancestor, he found himself cast as an entertainer from a very ' early age »in order to survive«. After training as a