WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Rampant rabbits take over Sussex beauty spot. No, this is not an extra chapter in Watership Down, but my interpretation of Glyndebourne’s staging of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. Just before the production pauses for the long interval (an hour and 20 minutes, during which the opera-goers have dinner) the stage is filled with cartoon-like bunnies simulating copulation, all perfectly choreographed and looking like they had sprung straight from Nickelodeon.
I never fail to be surprised by opera. I am not an opera buff and need good reasons to attend. In this instance, it was an invitation from a couple I enjoy seeing, to a location that is very beautiful, in the company of others whom I knew I would find stimulating. The music was a bonus.
This could be the story of the English summer. Someone observed to me recently that this season of the year is about walls, doors and food. Take a wall, any wall, put a door in it, make it difficult to get a ticket to go through the door, and put smart food and drink on the other side. People will pay a fortune to get through that door, irrespective of what is happening – sport, opera, even a flower show. And they will pay up more than once a season!
This can lead to very tricky situations. My friend with a VCH (Very Clever Husband) was invited with him to Glyndebourne recently to see Falstaff. It’s a great production, and they were the guests of lovely people, so they accepted – despite having already seen the production earlier in the season. During dinner, VCH was asked by his hosts if he had been to Glyndebourne already that season. “Yes,” he truthfully replied. “And what did you see?” he was asked.
At this point VCH’s brain, which fortunately operates at very high speed, had to perform a large number of simultaneous calculations even more rapidly than usual. What should he say? Should he admit to having already seen Falstaff? Would that be offensive? If not Falstaff, what else should he say that he had seen? What else had been on? Was there time to reach for the programme and check?
He intimated that they had seen something else. It turned out that his hosts had also been to Glyndebourne earlier in the season and had seen the other production. Had he enjoyed it? At this point even VCH realised that he needed his Very Supportive Wife to bail him out and turn the conversation away from what happened in the second act of an opera he had not seen.
The surprising thing about Glyndebourne is not how many people go to the same production more than once a season, but how the company puts on such spectacular productions without government subsidy. Even if you are not an opera fan, go and wonder at this – in an age when taxpayers’ money goes on more and more bizarre things, it is worthy of note.
However, I struggled to get into The Fairy Queen – even with the rampant rabbits. It got easier after the interval, during which I was briefed by one of my fellow guests on what Restoration audiences would have expected and enjoyed. By the second act I was imagining myself back in the latter half of the 17th century and enjoyed it a lot more, especially the mournful lament of a widow for her husband. (Personally, I am not sure I would have wept for so long. At least she would no longer have to pick up his laundry from the bedroom floor.)
As the novelist Jeanette Winterson says: “Glyndebourne is more than a night at the opera; it is music for the rest of your life.” She has recently edited Midsummer Nights, a book of short stories by a range of authors to celebrate the festival’s 75th birthday, which I am about to start reading. The blurb on it says that “the results range from comic delights to moving dissections of relationships”. Yes, but will it have rampant rabbits?
