ABSTRACT
Modernism inched its way into British theatrical consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century. It was gradually becoming clear that the Romantic pictorial approach to the presentation of plays was bound to fail: a picture is two-dimensional; an actor has three dimensions. This mismatch threw the basic form of drama into disarray, and it had to be reconfigured. British theatregoers were captivated and bewildered. Bernard Shaw tried to capture Wagner for a sort of Fabian socialism in The Perfect Wagnerite by opining, for instance, that Alberich’s dream was a depiction of industrial capitalism. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé , heavily indebted to French Symbolism, met a similar fate. The French Symbolists transformed Wagner’s insistence on myth into something more dreamy, more occult and suggestive, and it was from this mix that Godwin’s disciple, Wilde, created Salomé in French.
