Hugh Mistake
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