Falstaff
Glyndebourne
There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour. Really that should have come as no surprise, since seriousness or anyway a plausible imitation of it is so much more absorbing, and therefore agreeably demanding, than tripping the light fantastic and driving all over the country in search of forgotten operettas set in Ruritania. ‘Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment,’ as Samuel Johnson remarked, with characteristic casual penetration, and it is a lesson that patrons seem in some measure to have learned, even if managements and artistic administrators haven’t.
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