Michael Tanner

Identity crisis | 21 January 2009

Skin Deep<br /> Opera North Verdi’s Requiem<br /> Barbican

Skin Deep
Opera North

Verdi’s Requiem
Barbican

It takes a brave person, or more likely couple, to attempt an operetta which effectively satirises contemporary fads, and the more obvious the target the more difficult to pull off the satire with the requisite degree of scathingness. David Sawer and Armando Iannucci have taken cosmetic surgery, and while they are about it have intelligently enlarged the matter to prolonging rejuvenated lives (this is a co-commission of Opera North, the Bregenz Festival and the Royal Danish Opera). Skin Deep is set, for the first two acts, in the Swiss Alps, and concerns the practices of Dr Needlemeier, so I take it that the reference is to Dr Niehans, who injected many distinguished patients with sheep’s testicles, among them Pius XII, Churchill and Somerset Maugham, who attended his clinic in Clarens. It’s not a good sign that a, or the, central joke of Skin Deep involves losing a testicle, a subject which used to be heavily recruited to raise laughs, but lost its fertility in that respect some decades ago. One of the main characters is called Luke Pollock, so since the text rhymes I was anxious: and Mark Stone, the glamorous baritone who plays the Hollywood star Luke, is tricked into becoming a monorchidist, and later a small brown object is found which occasions much merriment as he sticks it down his boxers. You don’t believe it? Well, don’t go and see for yourself, because you will be subjected to a whole evening on that level, devoid, furthermore, of the least musical interest. That Richard Farnes should be conducting this when we hear him in so few major operas is unbearable.

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