The Metropolis

10 things I learned at the opera, by a first time opera goer

Mike Pollitt | Tuesday 28 June, 2011 11:43

I went to see the new cybersex opera Two Boys last night at the Coliseum. The closest I’ve been to an opera before is watching season 1 of Glee. Here is what I discovered.

1. It feels nice to dress more smartly than usual. I was so perturbed my by accomplice’s remark that “operas tend to be quite smart” that I excavated an iron from under the stairs and made a pitiful attempt to decrease my trousers. I needn’t have bothered, jeans and t-shirts were abundant, but I felt a fleeting sense of sartorial superiority.

2. The Coliseum seats were a lot more comfortable than I expected. In my experience the more highbrow the performance, the more crucifying the seat. It’s called suffering for your art. But these were plush on the tush.

3. Teenage boy wanking jokes are almost always funny.

4. Contemporary language sung in operatic tones can be fatally bathetic. When a doctor solemnly belts out something like “He’s staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaable, but he’s lost a lot of bloooooooooooooooooooooooood”, or a policewoman trills “did you monitor his online activitiiiiiiiiiiies?”, it would take a heart of stone not to LOL. I do not possess that heart.

5. When the chorus appears about 20 minutes in the thing really starts to get going. Maybe about 20 people holding laptops which shine like candles on the stage, singing over each other, harmonising their sound but distorting their words, representing the incessant chatter of a 24/7 online world. Very good.

6. I estimate the hearing rate for this opera at being about 85%. That is, about 15% of the lyrics might as well be sung in Italian for all I could tell what they were saying. This matters less than you’d think.

7. There are some cool staging and visuals going on. At one point during a scene, some CCTV footage is projected onto the back wall. As the actors onstage watch the footage, their shadows seem to be moving in the CCTV behind. This identity headfuck fits in beautifully with the opera’s themes.

8. Those themes are absolutely the right ones to be talking about now. Is the online world less real than the physical? Is an online identity less valid than one forged face to face? When do fantasies become dangerous? Why are teenage boys so awful? And so on and so forth.

9. In any medium, it’s surely no longer acceptable to rely on the trope whereby a detective solves a case because some gormless sod says something to them in passing which finally makes the penny drop.

10. Overall, I kinda liked it. You can get tickets for £16, which I would recommend. You can also get tickets for £53, which is completely insane. And it’s fine to just wear a t-shirt.

Read proper reviews by people who know what they’re talking about here (positive), here (negative), and here (meh).

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