The upper middle-class in England, ever keen to show how utterly sophisticated they are compared with the hoi pollio are flocking to the English National Opera's modernised production of Verdi's "Masked Ball". It opens with the male singers reading a newspaper, sitting on lavatory seats with their trousers down. (The photo in today's Independent doesn't seem to show any toilet rolls, and this bothers me.) Apparently, this version is also replete with drug-fuelled orgies of sex and violence along with transvestites.
It also might be added that this production is estimated to add a US$1 million loss to the English National Opera's existing debt of US$10 million kindly made up by a grant from the Arts Council of England -- and paid for by ordinary taxpayers. The principal singer, tenor Julian Gavin, withdrew from the leading role saying he could not appear in a production to which he felt unable to bring his children. This makes me feel less of a prude when I think back some years ago to a production in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon (also supported by the Arts Council) when I walked out of a scene in which the actors were performing sex au naturel. I don't think we're quite at the point yet of calling the bluff of the artistic middle classes. It wouldn't be so bad if they paid the full economic costs of their tickets and didn't sponge on the rest of us. The Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts was summarily fired from his post a week or two ago when he described Tracy Emin's "Unmade Bed" (which won the prestigious Turner Prize two years ago) as 'crap'. So we're not quite ready yet to tell the Emperor about his clothes. In due course, this modern, absurd obeisance to the 'serious arts' will go by the board, and there'll be another fashion, another way of the 'beautiful people' showing their natural superiority to the rest of us. And, I imagine, ordinary people will continue to pay for it, as always. Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
