Pasolini’s Salò Redubbed review: A notorious film becomes an overwhelming mirror up to Ireland’s past

Dylan Tighe's bold adaptation transposes Salò from Italy to the early decades of the Irish state, an era when alliances were hatched between church and state. Photo: Luca Truffarelli 

Abbey Theatre (Peacock Theatre), Dublin Theatre Festival

★ ★

Few films are as notoriously unpleasant as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, now redubbed live in a bold adaptation by Dylan Tighe and the Abbey Theatre. Set in a Nazi puppet state during WWII, Pasolini’s 1975 film follows a group of wealthy Italian libertines who hold teenagers captive in a palace and subject them to horrific sexual abuse. For some it’s a proto-splatter film fascinated with human degradation. For others it’s an unflinching portrayal of fascism.

Tighe sees Saló as a mirror. His play transposes the film from Italy to the early decades of the Irish state, an era when alliances were hatched between church and state. The opening scene peers inside an elegant private chamber where the libertines, resembling shadowy politicians and lawmakers, write their signatures into a book of regulations, sealing their rule. 

In his onstage introduction to the play, Tighe says that “every era has its own form of fascism”. There’s something complicit, then, in Ellen Kirk’s costuming, as it dresses actors in sport jerseys and school uniforms. Against a projection showing Saló, they sit behind monitors and meticulously dub dialogue, which, in Tighe’s arch script, takes on Irish sounds. (“Hey Anto,” says a child. “Cop on out of that, would ya,” says Anto). 

After an incongruous appearance by sunlit palatial Salò as our own coastal Sligo, the film’s cinematography passes well for a celluloid version of mid-century Ireland. The camera moves through green countryside and inside monastic orphanages. The libertines - given unsettling lecherous voice by Peter Gaynor, Will O’Connell and Daniel Reardon - examine several teenagers who are interred for mental disorders, for being members of ethnic minorities and “fallen women”. 

That’s a daring allegory of Ireland’s history of institutionalisation. But as the play reaches the libertines’ palace, it loses the space to recombine familiar iconography in new ways. Pasolini’s film itself is an adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade’s infamous novel of brutal sexual fantasy. Pasolini’s Saló Redubbed starts to take on the rhythms of a horror play, pummelling us with displays of violence that only intensify in extremity - from awful acts of rape and force-feeding excrement, to torture and murder. 

Over the persevering length, Tighe’s production doesn't quite sustain. Even the subversive touch of having the prostitutes (Niamh McCann and Gina Moxley) deliver real testimonies of abuse, accompanied by drawing room piano, can’t stand out from the gloom. Other embellishments - such as an onstage food delivery during a sickening feast - speaks more to the production’s sly methods than the cruelty of its subject. 

In fact, the play loses its finer sense of invention as it moves into the present, reading aloud suppressed voices from direct provision and tragedies from the Syrian War. Fascism seems like a subtle inheritance, but the ushering in of flags, representing so-called democracies, is broader and heavy-handed. 

A mirror can reflect the truth, but how useful is a mirror that is too overwhelming to look at? Without alternative, our only option is to cow to the grim truth, until the destruction of everything is complete.   

Runs until Oct 5th.