Culture vulture on the loose

A week on from rocking along to Bowling for Soup, Cathy, me and the Russes enjoyed the Welsh National Opera performing Madame Butterfly. Again we were in the bargain seats and again we valued the fact that the Millennium Centre has subtitles for opera as my Italian hasn’t improved since La Boheme.

And how’s this for multicultural? An opera set in Japan where a main character is American, sung in Italian, with Welsh subtitles.

As previously, the set was very good and the performance was presumably good. People who had the look of more regular opera goers applauded enthusiastically at the end. But I did find the main male lead (who played the villainous American B.F. Pinkerton) very weak as a singer. He seemed to lack volume and charisma.

I found the undercurrent of a ‘disposable’ attitude towards the developing world was very culture-relevant. Pinkerton laughing about how he rented a property on a 999 year lease which he could cancel every month showed where the balance of power lay – and his attitude towards his bride mirrored that. She was his to use until he married a "proper American bride".

The real tragedy, as I saw it, was that Butterfly so desperately wanted to be an American, trusting her American husband to redeem her after she became a pariah for her cultural apostasy. Her betrayal by the man who never regarded her as an equal despite her sacrifices has huge parallels with contemporary corporate colonialism and is one of the most savage indictments of Western attitudes since Nick Nolte’s rant about how Africans don’t matter to the Western powers that be in Hotel Rwanda:

Colonel Oliver: [explaining why the world will not intervene] You're black.
You're not even a nigger. You're an African.

La Boheme

Last night I lost my opera virginity after “the Russes” bought us tickets to see the Welsh National Opera’s La Boheme at the Wales Millennium Centre (known to everyone who lives near to it as The Armadillo because it looks likes… well, a giant armadillo).

We arrived late and had to leg it up four flights of stairs to get in on time. I had a bit of a shock to find my boss sat on the end of our row. Elaine pointed out that he shouldn’t be sitting in the ‘cheap seats’ with the likes of us. The seats were very cheap – just a fiver, which made a night at the opera a much more affordable risk. At least this way if we hated it we could leave at the end of the first act. The good thing about sitting near the back is that we could get to the bar/toilets first in the interval. Score!

Another major plus were the subtitles in English (and Welsh!). Without them I would have been totally lost. The story is a romantic tragedy (hey! this is an opera) about a poet, Rudolfo, who falls in love with a sickly neighbour, Mimi, then tries to break up with her because he thinks that shacking up in his dilapidated flat is worsening her health. But it’s too late and she dies anyway.

In the car on the way home I pointed out that the whole thing should have been sponsored by British Gas as the main reason Mimi dies is because of a lack of heat. You could imagine an advert where someone explains the plot and someone chimes in smartly to say ‘they should have got British Gas’s super-duper home cover. It costs less than you think.’ The only problem is that the ad would only appeal to the 1% of the population who go to opera, but I suppose they might get the servants to investigate it further…

As to the performance itself – I’m not an expert on opera, but it seemed pretty good to me, especially with four reasonably long breaks in which to chat, which made it much more social than a night out at the cinema. It was a bit tricky to follow when the subtitles got out of sync with the songs a one point. The music seemed good (but I hadn’t heard it before so had nothing to compare it to), and the sets were superb. I tried to make a joke when the conductor came on stage for a bow at the end, saying “I don’t remember that character. Is he the vampire?” Sadly, Elaine thought I was being a bit of a dunce and started to explain that he was the conductor. Ho hum.

The message of the opera is that love overcomes, but obviously these ‘Bohemians’ with their free love and their poetry have to suffer the effects of their freedom (we can’t endorse immorality after all!). And so the poetry = poverty = death storyline acts as a warning against the bohemian lifestyle, with Mimi a victim not of love, which is virtuous, but of the selfishness of hedonism. Ho hum again. But I did like one stand out quote, when Mimi explains that “I don’t go to church much, but I pray to God a lot.”

The other stand out quote of the night was Elaine explaining that “You can move faster in high heels when you’ve had a drink…” Hmmm.