Camden Fringe Review: 1918: The Final Salome, Etcetera Theatre ★★½

A fragmented true story about protecting Oscar Wilde’s legacy, scaled down for the Camden Fringe

Maud Allan performing as Salome at Király Színház, Budapest. Photo by József Kossak. Uj Idők, 1907-01-20, nr. 4, p. 85

In the spring of 1918, the dancer Maud Allan brought a libel case against the MP Noel Pemberton-Billing over an article accusing her of decadence and treachery, prompted by her own performance in Oscar Wilde‘s Salomé. The trial resurrected public disapproval of Oscar Wilde, whose own failed libel trial had initiated his arrest, conviction and imprisonment for sodomy two decades earlier. 1918: The Final Salomé takes that moment and turns it on Robbie Ross, Wilde’s literary executor and self-styled “first boy,” watching the trial reopen wounds he had spent years trying to close on his friend’s behalf.

Lily Zhang‘s script has already had a life beyond the fringe circuit: it was runner-up for Best Play at the Oxford New Writing Festival 2025, staged there with a cast of around ten working fragmented, deliberately non-linear and non-chronological time-jumps between the courtroom, Ross’s house, and a framing device set decades later. This Camden Fringe outing is a different animal: six actors in sixty minutes. Whatever else changed in the move from one to the other, the wider framing strand appears to have gone entirely, there’s no doctor, nurse, or judge in this programme, so what’s left is the core 1918 story: Ross, the trial, and his own home.

Within that smaller shape, I still found it genuinely hard to track who several of the periphery characters were meant to be. I was confident I was watching a courtroom, and confident I was in Ross’s house, at one point strongly suspecting Scotland Yard were searching it, plausible both dramatically and historically, given how thoroughly Ross’s own circle was gone through amid the period’s paranoia. But beyond Ross, Maud Allan, and Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s son, the rest of the ensemble blurred together more than I’d like, and I don’t think that was for want of paying attention. The cast are articulate and usually easy to follow individually, but at points they’re deliberately directed to speak over one another, almost as a quartet, and it’s in those moments that the thread is hardest to hold onto.

Where the production earns real credit is in how it handles its own limitations. The Etcetera is a small room and it was used well: blocking was always clear and the cast played to the audience rather than at each other. Individually, every line was audible and clearly spoken. Peregrine Neger‘s Robbie Ross and Rhys Ponsford‘s Vyvyan Holland in particular had a believable warmth between them that anchored the scenes they shared. Costume and hair felt properly of the era, and Annabelle Higgins’s Maud Allan dressed for the courtroom rather than for Salomé herself, a choice that makes sense given the frame the production has kept. Noisy music bled through from downstairs at one point, entirely outside the company’s control, and to their credit nobody let it show.

The dialogue, when it settled into the courtroom and the house, carried real weight, this is clearly the product of proper time spent with the period rather than a skim of the highlights. The difficulty is one of shape rather than substance: fitting Zhang’s original, larger structure into six actors and an hour seems to have cost some of the legibility that reportedly made the fuller version sing.

The house was warm, and I don’t think that was misplaced. This is writing that has already been recognised as strong when it had the cast to carry its full shape. On this smaller outing it doesn’t quite land in the same way. Perhaps a more standard timeline would work better in this scaled-down structure, six actors and an hour may simply be better served by telling this story straight through than by keeping the fragmented, time-jumping shape that a fuller cast could carry.

[Thank you to Carfax Productions for a gifted ticket for an honest review.]

Maud Allan image: Maud Allan performing as Salome at Király Színház, Budapest. Photo by József Kossak. Uj Idők, 1907-01-20, nr. 4, p. 85 (public domain)
Peregrine Neger and Ren Stefanacci Image: Bella Wan

1918: The Final Salomé continues to Edinburgh Fringe, 17–22 and 24–29 August, Olive Studio, Greenside @ George Street. Produced by Carfax Productions.

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