Michael Tanner

Hugh Mistake

Kismet -Coliseum / Falstaff - Grange Park

I thought I was unembarrassable, at any rate with the lights out. ENO’s production of Kismet has proved me wrong. I sat blushing furiously and sweating, when I wasn’t struggling to keep my eyes open and head up. Anyone who thinks — and some people do — that artistic badness is merely a lack of artistic goodness should see this show and admit that they have been decisively refuted. It has every variety of ineptitude, and it isn’t easy to imagine who looked at the script and read the score and still decided it was performable; what is harder still to imagine is how it can ever have been a popular hit. In 1953 lyrics about the desirableness of living in Baghdad, what fun it is, merry and gay, and so on, wouldn’t of course have seemed out of place. It isn’t an access of PC that leads one to say they do now — Baghdad is as inevitably associated, for us, with horror and suffering as some other names, and it is hardly conceivable that those responsible for putting the show on would have thought that the contrast between the fun-exotic world that the word conjured up in 1953 would be piquant but amusing in comparison to how it registers now. Predictably, the audience mainly kept silent as the pleasures of Baghdad were enumerated, with a few evidently uneasy laughs.

But that was only one of what could be a protracted list of the show’s kinds of wretchedness. There are the reams of witless dialogue, delivered in the let’s-hope-this-reaches-the-back-of-the-gallery manner one associates with old-style musicals, but since everyone was amplified, unnecessarily; and to the point of distortion and unintelligibility. There is the cheapness of the sets and drapes, already looking tatty on the second night.

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