STAYING ALIVE

What I’ve missed most over the past eighteen months has been live performance. Quite how much I realised the Sunday before last at Glyndebourne. The first test was whether my one-time sylph like form now enlarged by lunching and lounging about at home would fit into my dinner jacket and trousers. “Only just” was the answer as my trousers were tourniquet tight. We were to see Luisa Miller a Verdi opera little known and seldom performed created a few years before Rigoletto and La Traviata. It was the first night. The soprano was an Armenian who was making her Glyndebourne debut. She was described as Armenia’s best singer.

Our breath was held, our mood skittish – this was a new experience…going out, eating, drinking, watching and listening. Throughout the auditorium  there were corpulent afficionados conversing in voices like Brian Sewell. 

Conversation quietened to a hum, the conductor arrived in the orchestra pit flamboyantly; he waved his baton and the curtain went up. It was like being transported back to the mid-1960s, to a Rita Tushingham film called “The Knack …and how to get it” which had a house painted inside entirely in white. It’s stark and strange. I confess I was not blown away – I heard whispered comments “it’s all about triangles”…”virginity”… “they ran out of money”. 

After dinner, which incidentally was brilliant and colourful, in the second act something extraordinary happened that can only happen in live performance. It was like falling in love or being hit by a bolt of lightning. The star-crossed lovers and the turmoil around them became the only thing on my mind. It was much more than a suspension of disbelief. It was a heightened sense of being, like flying in a balloon or the feel of Mediterranean sun on your face as you get off the plane on holiday. I was transported.

The singing was magnificent, the feelings tragic, hopeless and gut wrenching. Mane Galoyan, the debutante, extraordinary, moving and joyous. Joyous? How odd to see a tragedy, a car crash of a relationship and feel happy. That again is what live performance can do. 

The many reviews unanimously lauding the opera, the performance of everyone and describing Mane as a “revelation” were the best I’ve seen for anything ever.

I was lucky. It was like winning the lottery. Unknown opera. Unknown lead singer. Tightly trousered I basked in the glow of a triumph and felt I somehow owned a bit of it.

What I love about live performances is the frisson that the risk of doing it brings. My wife when asked to sing that solo first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City” said solemnly “If I muck it up I’ll ruin everyone’s Christmas”. She didn’t. Christmas survived. But the point was a poignant one.

As I ease back into being sociable again I realise how tiresomely functional life became in the lockdown. There was no smell to anything, no surprises, no spontaneity, no discovery, like Mane the Armenian soprano’s, that one could fly.

Last week I met an old friend and we started to talk about companies or business or political leaders we admired and trusted.

We struggled for a few minutes and then we began to discover we were, in fact, impressed by a lot of companies, mostly quite small, many run by women.

It’s only when you can see body language as opposed to being on a Zoom call that magic can happen. Human beings are meant to mingle and share. They are meant to perform. 

Live performance can transform you. Without it life is dead dull.

"WE DISCARD CAUTION IN SEARCH OF PLEASURE" (Duke of Mantua)

To Covent Garden to see Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’ - classic opera or contemporary exposé? When the shagfest of a first act started I realised ‘Rigoletto’ is a story of now, not of 1850 when Verdi wrote it.

It’s story of rape, female subjugation and lads’ banter.

Imagine the Duke of Mantua (aka Harvey Weinstein) in his court (“This production contains some nudity and scenes of a sexual nature” warns the programme, yep, writhing bodies and lots of pelvic thrusting). This is Hollywood, baby.

The Duke has just seduced/ravished (one of many such conquests) the daughter of a Count who’s rightly pissed off by this. The court jester, a crippled, misanthropic hunchback, Rigoletto, (think of Olivier’s Richard III without the poetry) derides this count who places a curse on him to Rigoletto’s great discomfiture.

Cut to his home to which he hurries to the beautiful, innocent Gilda his daughter. En route he meets the sinister Sparafucile, imagine a Check-a-Trade assassin openly plying his skills. Rigoletto says “not right now, son.” He lectures his sweeter than sweet Gilda on staying indoors, apart from her Sunday trips to church, to avoid men. He checks with Giovanna her nurse that she safely confined. (What sort of life is this? The girl is a prisoner.) But nursey being corrupt lets in a young man whom Gilda’s seen at church where she was hit by a thunderbolt when their eyes had met. But it’s really the Duke in disguise stalking a likely conquest…what a scallywag! When he gets in the house there are lots of surreptitious embraces and arias until they are interrupted.

Cut to the court. Someone has seen Gilda in Rigoletto’s house and assumes it is his mistress “let’s kidnap her” they chortle - bit of amusing female abduction - what fun! When Rigioletto interrupts them in flagrante they pretend it’s someone else’s wife they’re taking. “Put on this mask” they laugh so he can’t see what’s going on. And when he realises the truth it’s too late.

Back to court where the gang of rapists and criminals are congratulating themselves “nice one Cyril!” The Duke hurries off to the room where Gilda is (not just for a chat we can surmise). A miserable Rigoletto arrives and is ridiculed as his daughter is deflowered inside with Mantuan thoroughness. The curse is working!

Rigoletto plans revenge. He’ll get Sparafucile to kill the Duke. But it goes horribly wrong because Gilda, still in love with the ghastly Harvey Weinstein of Mantua, overhearing the plot to kill the Duke decides she’ll intercede so it is she, in the dark, not the Duke, who is stabbed. RIP. She dies. Rigoletto is destroyed with grief.

Thrillingly sung and performed, we men in the audience should have slunk out shamefaced. (If that’s pleasure son you can keep it.) Verdi does Sodom and Gomorrah brilliantly and timelessly. My ears joyed at the music, my brain fizzed with thoughts of male madness.

I ONCE HAD THAT RICHARD HALL IN THE BACK OF MY CAB

Taxi drivers in Brighton are different to the ones in London because so many of them seem to do it as an eccentric hobby. One said to me, his CD player playing Verdi very loudly “if you don’t like opera you can bugger off.” Another was doing GCSE Spanish to keep her daughter company.

The distinctive Brighton cabs proving the concept of safety in numbers

The other day I came across one who talked about oxymorons. The local Council are introducing radical and expensive traffic calming measures at a local roundabout with seven roads leading on to it. This cab driver and I discussed it, me with the theory that anywhere so palpably tricky called for great care and good manners. However this seems a minority view. The driver leaned across looking over his left shoulder as they do and said ‘whenever they say “road improvements” you know to means traffic jams or worse’. And so it was we began talking about oxymorons.

I’ve no idea what this means but I think we should pepper Britain with them to encourage people

Like “military intelligence”, “school food”, “National Health”, “tough love” (a way of justifying being beastly like that antiquated lie “this will hurt me more than it hurts you.”).

But there are three that are currently in constant use that worry me more.

“Business Plan” –or works of self-deluding fiction as I call them yet a lot of people spend a lot of time doing them very carefully.

Depressing? Yes and very, very boring. 

“Creative Workshop” – Dickens and Picasso would have loved these (not). In truth creativity and conferences of executives are by very definition at odds.

“Negative Profits”- which I love because it’s so obviously a lie. Here’s tough love again, here’s any phase which sounds positive but contains a problem. Like “stock adjustment” which means “we’ve run out.”

And finally “sell by date” which demands the response “not necessarily”. This is the single, greatest cause of food waste in the world.

But none of these quite evoke my ire like T-Mobile. My wife uses them. She pays her bills always and on time. Her latest cheque has been banked by them but they are saying it hasn’t been and are hounding her. This is made worse whilst they are asking her to check it and provide proof of payment.

Good brand name, shame about the disconnect.

“Life’s for sharing” says their website – which is not so much oxymoronic as moronic from people who seem to think they are right and their customers are wrong.

And as my taxi driver said “don’t get me on to customer service. Just don’t”.

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