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Valentine’s Day – a day of love, romance and kissing… lots of kissing if London is anything to go by; come early evening the Tube was jammed with couples kissing on platforms and in carriages… not snogging, just repeatedly kissing each other and whispering sweet nothings – all quite nauseating. Suzie_Q and I were off to the Royal Opera House to see the opening night of Madama Butterfly – a Christmas present I bought my wife… to be received on Valentine’s Day – see what I did? Genius This was our first outing to the opera… and I can also safely say it will be our last.

Now quite what Suzie_Q had expected of the opera I don’t know; she’d seen it in the film Pretty Woman and thought it would be romantic. I had accidentally seen snippets of opera on BBC2 flicking through channels and knew just what we were in for, or at least I thought I did… the reality was worse than watching paint dry. At one point I was so bored I considered throwing my empty water bottle over the balcony and shouting “Get ON with itâ€?. My imagination ran wild as I thought of how great it would be if this production turned out to be a modern alternative version of Madama Butterfly, with Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy arriving on a flying cloud to add some excitement.

The main issue I had with Madama Butterly was how slow and tedious it all was, entire scenes were devoted to singing the same thing in as many different ways as possible (and naturally in Italian). At one point I read the surtitles (they appear above the stage), got bored, counted the number of people I could see on our floor (243) and when I went back to the surtitles, the actors were still singing their way through the exact same line. Having shelled out nearly £250 for balcony seats which were really quite underwhelming (and uncomfortable) I spent the rest of the evening trying to think of anything more boring I had done in my life. I could only think of school assemblies spent cross legged on a hard cold floor listening to Head Masters waffle on about nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, the actors are fantastically talented – I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it must be to learn lines in Italian, let alone sing them to a packed Royal Opera House. I also very much appreciate the skills of the musicians in the live orchestra, indeed my best three minutes of the evening were spent just listening with my eyes shut and not watching the snail-paced action unfold.

The story of Madama Butterfly is an odd one which I shall summarise; A dirty old American bloke called Pinkerton is in Japan, he buys himself a 15 year old ‘Butterfly’ (which by today’s standards put him on a par with Gary Glitter), he marries her so that he can have his wicked way, leaves, turns up three years later with a new American wife, takes his half Japanese son home and Madama Butterfly kills herself in despair. You see how quickly I described that? It took over two hours of tedious detailed operatic singing for that to take place with no additional excitement.

The best bit of the evening came (not when the two blokes beside us engaged in a full on snog) but when the young actor playing a three year old (although he looked more like seven) ran on at full pelt and slipped over on a ‘flower’ – luckily into the arms of Madama Butterfly where he was headed anyway… I was praying for him to burst into tears but no such luck. When the final curtain came down I was so excited, I haven’t felt that much relief since the time I landed back in the UK after three weeks in god forsaken Australia. I guess all this moaning means I’m not cultured, not a great shame if that’s what culture’s all about – give me a West End show like Daddy Cool any day.

 

Technorati Tags: madama butterfly, opera, opera house, boredom

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