Welcome to the show (NB – see last post for a brief account of the ‘action’) -our latest Mixed Media Entertainment, or Opera if you will still insist on using that “dark-ages” posh word: a story (from some disaster plotting cliché) of murder and retribution, actors who also sing (or perhaps it is singers who also act… and some even get the chance to dance), music energetically played by the orchestra (well, we are told there is a piano at any rate), a stage with set designs and props (the room, and tables, chairs, the bottle, and so on), and an audience of sorts…
… and of course the critics. For instance – “Lamentably provincial” writes Igor Stravisnsky, when the production reaches the USA in five years’ time, “the music plays a miserable role as illustrator in a very embarrassing realistic style”.
But back in the revolutionary homeland (“from our Soviet point of view”, as the main man* says) our entertainment is an instant hit, everybody wants to go and see it, and it quickly becomes the talk of the town. Not that it doesn’t divide us in our views. “Revealed with incredible force the expression of human sorrow and the despair of the lost soul”, says Pinky our high street butcher, meat cleaver in hand. “Sordid character and depraved atmosphere in which the action takes place”, says Perky (his wife), tut-tutting as she takes the last penny from out of the outstretched hand of a flinching customer at the front of the queue.
“Primitive satire”, Daniil Zhitmirsky writes in the official newspaper review, having been told from above to reassert some kind of control. Because this work is not some low-toothed sad insipid English kind (eg on ‘Carry On Cutting’ lines), but far rougher and sharper, a Russian variety of 'anecdotny' where the jokes can sometimes hurt so much they feel like a deathly frost-bite! (Remember, always remember: We are joking and we are being serious).
The Truth (Pravda) says it was cold enough last week to remind us of home, and I have been having memories of the harshness of childhood winters in the east midlands, but this is not 1917, 1924, 1933, or even 1956 or 1968. It is today. And you are asking, ladies and gentlemen, and girls and boys, what difference are we making today?
Are we in protest?
It is possible.
And perhaps you want to hope with something more than comic hope that we can make a difference, are making a difference, but our advice to you is don’t – Don’t hope too much. Not quite yet… We still remain cautious of making claims that we know where we are heading, who for and who against, because everywhere – but everywhere – we continue to leak (even the most powerful of governments cannot help leaking these days!). And oozing up from the archaeological depths of the recent past (or our ‘Urgeschichte’ as Uncle Wally describes it more succinctly) come hitherto long forgotten phrases that fill our wheezing bronchitic lungs :
Sous les pavées, la plage.
La chienlit, c’est lui.
Hmmm, the main man* pronounces, We can’t deny the possibility that a change is in the air.
—-
Go here for more information on the main man’s* version.
—-
* – 'The main man’ =
Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Op.29 ( Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – Леди Макбет Мценского уезда (Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo Uyezda)) first staged 1933 is in four acts.