Donohue’s lucid vernacular transformation of Douglas’s safe, thee-and-thou faux-biblical language has the quality of a startling modern-dress remounting of an overly familiar classic play. And yet Douglas’s stilted, inaccurate version has somehow retained a long-standing place on the stage and in the study. The play was first translated into English in 1894 by Wilde’s young friend Lord Alfred Douglas, but Wilde was far from pleased with the outcome. Presenting a colloquial and spare American English version of Wilde’s consciously stylized French, Donohue’s approach gives full value to the Irish author’s dark ruminations on evil and perversity in a world on the brink of a new, unsettling Christian dispensation. Joseph Donohue’s new translation of the horrific New Testament story has recast Wilde’s shockingly radical drama in the natural idiomatic language of our own day. Unique among his works, Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1893) was written originally in French.
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