MAGAN'S WORLD:Tales of a travel addict
Travel's usefulness in interpreting theatre stuck me recently at Rough Magic's masterful Dublin production of Sodome, My Love.
The play is about the last inhabitant of the destroyed town of Sodom, who returns to life having been preserved in salt for thousands of years. The set is suitably bleak: a salt- and sand-encrusted stage, a rusted metal grave-like bench, a grey silvery light infusing everything.
It’s powerful in its own right, but for anyone who has visited the area where Sodom and Gomorrah were believed to have stood, on the shores of the Dead Sea near the border between Israel and Jordan, the effect is almost overpowering.
The air, the heat, the cloying, stifled, light-diffused sense of that parched and barren place have been artfully summoned on a bare stage in Temple Bar, just metres from the revellers of the Purty Kitchen and Clarence Hotel. It’s uncanny how well a few tarnished panels capture the sinister strip of sea that glitters with dull malevolence in the haze.
- Olwen Fouéré's depiction of the last Sodomite, the woman who has remained encased in salt, with only her memory still active, has a trace of the enervated bewilderment that every visitor must feel in the area. There is something about the heavy concentration of bromide, magnesium and iodine in the air that saps one's life force. Bromide is used in many sedatives, and iodine is an effective destroyer of most life. All three are salts, and act like a poultice, sucking energy.
The rusted hunks of welded metal that occupy the stage are perfect evocations of the abandoned potash factory that now occupies the site of Sodom at the foot of Mount Sedom, a flat-topped salt bluff overlooking the sea.
Few tourists bother to visit it. The coaches ferrying holidaymakers to the beaches for their Dead Sea bathing experience rarely make the detour, repulsed by the rotten-egg smell of volcanic emissions and the ferocious desert heat, which seems magnified by being funnelled into a huge crater 400m below sea level.
Yet Mount Sedom is worth the clammy, stifling trek up its flank, as you get a great view of one of the columnar salt rocks that protrude prominently on both the Israeli and Jordanian sides of the border, and which are known locally as the remains of poor Lot’s wife, who was turned to salt for daring to look back while fleeing the fire and brimstone raining down on her town. What’s so terrible about looking back?
If you do visit the area, you’ll feel obliged to swim in the Dead Sea, as one of the unfathomable mysteries of tourism is the urge to acquire a picture of oneself lying on the thickly saline water, reading the newspaper. (There’s a decade of these unfathomable mysteries, including the urge to kiss a mossy slab of limestone in Cork and to stand with legs splayed across the equator – the kiss-me-quick hats of international tourism.) You should avoid this swim at all costs, and not just because it’s kitsch. The sea is dead because of its toxicity. In fact, it is so noxious that astrophysicists use it to replicate Martian oceans.
Only two-thirds of it is water; the rest is a cocktail of poisons that begin to pickle you as soon as you step in. These chemicals get into every groove and orifice of your body, beginning a process of desiccation that continues for the next few days, no matter how well you try to wash it off. It's not a pretty sensation – akin to being embalmed while alive, a slow torture of scratching and nasty rashes. If you really want to know what Lot's wife must have felt like these past 2,000 years, go to watch Fouéré when Sodome, My Lovegoes on tour.
- manchan@ireland.com