The Royal Opera House rape scene disgusted its audience. But it did not move them
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Version 0 of 1. The first time I went to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, about 200 years ago, the audience booed at the end of the production. I say 200 years ago; it was actually 1991, and a not overly admired revival of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. At the time, I knew no different, and just thought this was how grand opera audiences behaved – like hooligans. The next day, however, the scandal was on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. It’s a big deal when the members of a Covent Garden audience start behaving as though they’re still members of the Bullingdon club. On Monday night, Covent Garden booed again, this time in response to a staging of Rossini’s William Tell. I’m very sorry to have missed it – the booing as much as the full-fig Covent Garden opera. Both are quite the spectacle. The audience was upset because a rape scene, in which a young woman was stripped naked and sexually attacked by army officers, had been included in the production. The audience considered it to be offensive and gratuitous. The Guardian’s critic Tim Ashley called the whole production “wretched”, and the rape episode “pruriently voyeuristic”. I can’t defend the opera itself. But I do defend the idea that this rarefied art form should challenge its audience Maybe the scene was offensive and gratuitous. As I say, I go to the opera just a few times a year, and I wasn’t there. I don’t know. But I do know one thing: I have seen many operas in which tragic women come to sticky ends, and it’s pretty much always sad but beautiful stuff – moving and touching in the way opera is, and real life very often isn’t. But there’s no beauty in rape. That, says the director, Italian Damiano Michieletto, was the whole point: he wanted to show the ugliness of rape in war, a subject that is talked about more than it is tackled. But his audience didn’t want to see it. Maybe the audience is right. Maybe it’s good that grand opera hasn’t gone the way of film and telly, where graphic sex and violence are too commonplace to be shocking. Or maybe it’s right for the audience at London’s grandest theatre to be confronted with such stuff, and to find it disturbing. Maybe that audience was simply asked to think about something that it would rather not think about – the reality of abused women – rather than the pitiful romance of abused, ill and unfortunate women, which opera adores. I can’t defend the opera itself. But I do defend the idea that this rarefied art form should challenge its audience, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Even if I never go to Covent Garden again – it is awfully expensive, after all – I wouldn’t like to think that it was shying away from making harsh and difficult points about the horrors of this world, just for fear of booing. Opera generates controversy far beyond its immediate audience because it’s such an important means not just of expressing complex emotion and feeling but of invoking complex emotion and feeling in its audience. Opera is about as civilised as humans get. War, and the maiming of innocents in war, conversely, is about as uncivilised as humans get. It seems wrong for a room full of people to be angry that they have been subjected to the sight of a staged war rape when, as they watched, this was no doubt happening, for real, to real women. Related: Guillaume Tell review - sex, violence and protracted booing Most of us are guilty of preferring not to dwell too much on the unspeakable horrors that humans are inflicting on other humans, right now, in the world today. We want to escape from terrible, shocking headlines, and from terrible, shocking thoughts. People also can’t be blamed for not expecting opera to traumatise them. But if they want to be completely sure of it, they need to go to Gilbert and Sullivan. Likewise, however, when an opera director does decide that an audience is going to be discomfited and confronted by their production, they are under an extremely solemn obligation to make sure they really do have something meaningful and important to impart to the audience, and the ability to ensure that it is imparted well. Those who have seen this William Tell seem entirely unconvinced that Michieletto came anywhere near achieving that. It is easy to disgust an audience by showing it something disgusting. It’s harder to show an audience something disgusting and to move the people in it to pity and sadness for a world that lets such cruelty occur. Covent Garden has apologised to those who saw the opera. But I hope there will be a next time for this subject, and that the next time the audience will weep, not boo. |