You can’t blame frustrated directors for losing the plot

• of all the hordes who have a beef with opera, the straight-theatre crowd are by far the sniffiest. Naturally enough, their objections start with the peculiar singing, and pretty soon it’s all Johnson’s “exotic and irrational Entertainment” and the laughs that Addison, Pope and those lads got out of Handel; and to be fair, G-Fred’s fat capons, standing around in armour, hooped skirts and big hats, making taxi-hailing gestures and hooting away in Italian, must have been a lot of fun.

Or it’s our foolish plots, usually citing the Verdian likes of Trovatore and Ernani — but I ask you, surely anyone who can’t get off on a premise like “wrong baby on bonfire” is lacking some essential bit of the soul.

The truth they miss is that these risible texts — transmuted from pigswill to gold by musical alchemy — demonstrate the fatuity not of opera but of the spoken theatre whence they emerged: a catalogue of shame from the moron Gutiérrez who produced the original El trovador to Maurice Maeterlinck, whom nobody would remember if not for Debussy’s Pelléas &

Mélisande. Who is David Belasco without Butterfly, or Victorien Sardou but for large ladies launching themselves like dirigibles off the battlements (Tosca)?

In theatre’s history of abject ephemera, as M. Amis noted, search for something (other than old Oxford’s stuff, obvs) that has lasted a century and you are “soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian . . .” But perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps — yes, perhaps in half a millennium David Hare and Jez Butterworth will be setting the welkin ringing on Alpha Centauri or somewhere. Who can say?

opera likes to advertise itself as the fruitful mating of music and theatre, but the apter connubial metaphor might be a fight to the death with kitchen utensils. And directors who come to us from the theatre suffer much stress and conflict: they hate its being off-limits to mess with music and timing, but they do love the gigantic fees paid by state-run opera houses.

Those who try to wring these gamey old warhorses into some kind of credibility are instantly reviled by an audience who, while admitting operatic preposterousness (indeed, wearing it as some kind of badge of honour), also long for every cretinous nineteenth-century stage direction to be legally enforced: the ideal dramatic performance best represented by some gang from Bessarabian National Opera with their 50-date whistlestop tours from Redruth to Cullercoats, overnighting at Toddington Services, whose punctiliously literal shows feature temperamental scenery, Rodrigo the Dancing Stallion and the Musical Fountains of Seville (N.B. “No

horse in Nuneaton”, as the small print

WHILE DIRECTORS FERRET ABOUT UNEARTHING DUBIOUS METAPHORS, LARGE TRACTS OF THE AUDIENCE WOULD RATHER DIE THAN ADMIT ANY MEANING BEYOND WIGS AND WHOOPING CAMPERY

always says).

So, while directors and their cohorts of textual analysts and dramaturges, stuck forever in GCSE Theatre Studies, ferret about unearthing and wildly over-interpreting dubious metaphors, large tracts of the audience would rather die than admit any meaning or purpose to the creature beyond its wigs, lacy flounces and whooping campery.

This often works out surprisingly OK in Britain, in a familiar tragic compromise, but even that tepid hybrid is off limits now.