Matilda Bathurst

There’s nothing transgressive about opera using sex to sell tickets

Fluffy bunnies. Human-size, pink and white fluffy bunnies. Twerking. The image has never left me, ever since an ill-fated date to see Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne in 2012. Over salmon during the damp interval, my date confirmed that he liked the bunnies, I didn’t. Having established myself as a purist and a prude, we parted ways.

Since the onslaught of arts cuts, opera-goers have had to harden themselves to scenes of sex and violence – the oldest trick in the book to ramp-up ticket sales. The bunnies hopped on to the stage in the same year that ENO unveiled their notorious Don Giovanni condom ad; two years before, the company had spiced up Mozart’s opera with a scene of suggested gang rape. Now, obliged to rent out the Coliseum over the summer, ENO is responding to demands that opera ‘adapt or die ‘ by wheeling out the Don once again this September, breathlessly promising ‘sex, sex and more sex’. If human history followed the same pattern of adaption, we’d be stuck as endlessly multiplying bacteria.

Other opera companies are only slightly more subtle in their use of shock tactics. After the outrage caused by last year’s production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, the Royal Opera House thought it wise to send out email trigger-warnings in advance of Donizetti’s blood-soaked Lucia di Lammermoor – a move which was widely condemned as a publicity stunt. Glyndebourne’s general director Sebastian F. Schwartz has spoken of prioritising storytelling over sensationalism, stating that opera should never offend ‘just for effect’. The cover of this year’s festival programme highlights a production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a detail from Raqib Shaw’s painting ‘Self Portrait as Bottom’; the image zooms in on a scene of fairy sodomy, that lesser known sub-plot between Moth and Mustardseed.

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