This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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As a simple glance at most of them will tell you, there’s not a whole bunch of fun in being an opera critic — so we tend to greet the faintest prospect of joy with breathless hope.

Imagine, then, the bitter gall we had to drink when the summer’s incontestable highlight, a promised “anti-imperialist” staging of HMS Pinafore at the Arcola Theatre, E8, was scrapped. What could have been more timely, more opportune?

However feeble it would have been, and however ghastly the self-righteous little pricks behind it, this is kind of what the opera fringe is for

Not merely to out the monstrous G&S for slave-driving warmongers, but more piquantly to note the parallels between 1878, the year of Pinafore’s premiere, and now: another of those years of stage-managed anti-Russian hysteria, and that gimcrack Byron, Disraeli dispatching Pinafore and her sisters to the Dardanelles in his crusade to stop the Russkies from clearing the hardly-Nazi-affiliated-at-all Bashi-Bazouks out of the Balkans.

As it happens our matelots did a capital job, keeping the smelly Ivans out of the Med, bagging Cyprus for the team and instituting the venerable custom of the oral-sex competition which persists to this day at Ayia Napa. The truth must be that a D-Notice was slapped on the Arcola show owing to the shameful contrast between those happy days and our shiny non-air-craft carrier’s failed attempt to slink off to America to take a starring role in the next Pride celebrations, or something.

Of course, it never does to have any actual hopes for a show. The critic must never admit any but profoundly low
expectations — though in our glorious artistic scene even the lowest are often cruelly dashed.

Naturally, there would have been no such amusing reflections in that Pinafore; instead, it would have fastened on Dick Deadeye’s searingly unillusioned view of shipboard life. Scuppering the frigate of overweening British self-regard with his laser-like insights, Dick pinpoints the bitter irony of our blood-soaked tars’ fantasies of resisting dictatorial words and tyrant tongues when, as any “uni” fresher could tell you, they themselves are the primary worldwide purveyors of these baleful commodities.

Still, however feeble it would have been, and however ghastly the self-righteous little pricks behind it, this is kind of what the opera fringe is for, rather than just putting on shrunken performances of standard rep. In times when the hordes of terrific young singers pumped out by our conservatories have to make their own entertainment, the pub-theatre type of opera is a fertile year-round thing that blossoms in summer, this Arcola the hub with its “Grimeborn” Festival (yeah, ha ha).

Sadly, fringe audiences tend to be nothing like the attractive young person on the Grimeborn poster: Dalston is hardly the grunge edgeland of yore, and the audience has, as ever, been usurped by Living-Dead greyhairs, skulking down Kingsland High Street and trying desperately not to get beaten up.

Operatic history might be framed as a study of the bourgeoisie’s power to turn this intensely radical art form into its furry little plaything. There exists another myth that opera was once “for the people”, but despite what Italians tell you, opera houses in the nineteenth century were never rammed with the unwashed. Can you imagine even the Italian washed standing for that? But at least the cohorts of Austrian military bureaucrats and their local Quislings were regaled with insults from the stage: which was the real point.

Opera never had the slightest interest in the lower orders except as stage-meat and rough-trade sex-aids. Why would it? They’ve got their badger-baiting, dogging, telly. No, the idea, as even old Brecht understood, was to get the poshies in and then try to make them stop behaving like pigs — a project that has been over 100 per cent unsuccessful, with the arts demonstrably making their consumers far worse than they were before.

Still, hope dies last, and there has been much delight in the London summer, with the talented and energetic young Good Companions of the opera world doing the show right here from Blackheath to Hackney, Wapping to Peckham, Deptford to Little Chalfont — Zone 8, my dears! — and, for those fearful of straying from the omphalos, almost the fringiest of the lot was at the tiny Charing Cross Theatre where a charming, silly Donizetti rarity delighted the least operatic crowd I saw all summer.

The fringiest of the lot was at the tiny Charing Cross Theatre where a Donizetti rarity delighted the least operatic crowd I saw all summer

En route, we learned that you can remove an hour from the middle of Così fan tutte (Opera Kipling, Gatehouse, Highgate) and it becomes altogether more realistic now that only an irredeemable sluggard would take three hours to get his mate’s chick into bed.

Best value (though all these shows are phenomenally cheap) was British Youth Opera, doing Vaughan Wiliams’s forgotten Falstaff number with a fabulous, full-blooded orchestra (Southbank Sinfonia) to remind us that such things are actually possible outside the plutocrat sector — though at the other end, the Spectra Ensemble (Arcola) proved that Carmen can sound great on cello, bassoon and accordion.

The most ecstatic audience, in a pleasingly circle-closing manner, was for Charles Court Opera’s blazingly performed G&S Patience at Wilton’s Music Hall, a piece that takes extravagant delight in human vanity and folly.

It’s hard to think of a better show to be on permanent loop down in the ballroom as Cap’n Truss steers the poor old ship carefully onto the reef she and her pals have been so painstakingly building for the last 12 years.