Ticking boxes

Dante didn’t have the foresight to create or depict a circle of the Inferno designed expressly for opera critics, with intrepid explorers of new operas with social agendas as an extra. That was left for almost seven centuries until the Royal Opera House came up with the idea of the Linbury Studio Theatre, which answers the most stringent requirements for such a place of torment. You go down, down again and then down, sit in acute and always freshly experienced discomfort, and try to concentrate on yet another exploration of inequality, multiculturalism, a variety of shocking discriminations. Isn’t there a box to be ticked for letting a perfervidly right-wing budding musical dramatist air his or her views in multimedia form, leaving the audience rigid with fury and resentment, instead of the usual weary agreement that there are lots of things wrong with our society and it is the job of productions at the Linbury to make us want, or nod that we want, to put them right?

The latest addition to the Linbury canon is YES, text by Bonnie Greer and music by Errollyn Wallen. It concerns the notorious episode of Question Time in which Nick Griffin appeared, and was made to feel as uneasy as possible by the other panellists and especially by David Dimbleby, the chairman. Bonnie Greer was invited to appear, and, after soul-searching, she agreed. This docu-opera ends with the announcement of the start of the programme, so what we get is not, alas, Dimbleby taken by a resounding bass baritone, but the librettist sitting at her desk and watching, reflecting in the weeks leading up to the broadcast.

There is a large screen on to which the names of many tribes, groups of people who have lived in or invaded or otherwise arrived in the UK down the millennia, are projected, demonstrating that we have always been a mixed society.