BEACHCOMBER 101 YEARS OLD AND STILL OFFERS GOOD COUNSELLING...

THIS is turning out to be a busy and glorious week for operas: The Royal Opera House is halfway through Wagner’s Ring Cycle; the hugely talented people at Pop-Up Opera are doing a version of Bizet’s Carmen and on Friday, the head of John the Baptist will be in trouble in Richard Strauss’s Salome at the English National Opera. The singing and the music in all of these is fabulous but, as so often with opera, I feel that some thought before rushing into things could avoid the problems of the plots.

Take Wagner’s Ring: the kerfuffle, which continues for four glorious operas lasting some 18 hours, begins with a dispute between Wotan and the Irish giants he has employed to build a fortress for the gods. The work is done and payment is due but Wotan is having second thoughts about the clause in the contract specifying that his sister-in-law Freia will be included in the fee. The giants get annoyed, kidnap Freia and hold her to ransom and that’s where the trouble all starts.

The moral, of course, is that even if you are a god, you should recognise the importance of getting a lawyer to draw up a proper building contract and appointing a project manager and quantity surveyor to scrutinise it and supervise the work. One of them would surely have enough experience to realise that the inclusion of Freia in the clause regarding payment was legally dubious and sure to cause problems.

Bizet’s Carmen is much simpler to sort out. The Pop-Up Opera version I saw earlier this week in the splendid setting of Peckham Asylum Chapel was Peter Brook’s 1981 reworking of the opera, cut down to focus on Carmen’s disastrous loves and strife but keeping all the best bits of Bizet’s music.

Pop-Up have gone further by setting the story at the time of the Spanish Civil War with the bullfighter Escamillo turned into a shell-shocked war veteran. I am not sure this works, but it’s an interesting viewpoint and the singing is of such high quality that it really doesn’t matter. And the musical director Berrak Dyer is so brilliant on the piano that it’s worth going to just to hear her play. Pop in to popupopera. co.uk to see where their national tour is going to pop up next.

The seat prices, incidentally, are outstandingly good value, but again, I think a bit of calm deliberation would have saved Carmen’s situation.

The problem all begins with her love affair with the soldier Don Jose. In the Pop-Up production, incidentally, Chloe Latchmore gives us a gloriously seductive Carmen. Poor old Don Jose really stands no chance and falls totally in love with her, so when the fickle girl ditches him in favour of the matador/war-hero Escamillo, he is understandably upset and kills her.

Escamillo’s entrance was surely the moment for a relationship counsellor to leap onto the stage and negotiate a mutually agreed peaceful separation to save the situation.

I hope the ENO’s new Salome, which we are told will be a feminist version, includes a proper contract between King Herod and Salome for her dance of the seven veils, or I fear it will end badly again for John the Baptist.