Robert Thicknesse on Opera

Tits and teeth

AMONG OPERA’S MANY FAILURES, one of the feeblest is surely the way it wilfully ignores the most rewarding of all areas of aesthetic endeavour: I refer of course to its inexplicable neglect of vampires, while fannying about with all manner of half-arsed sub-vampire behaviour that simply begs to be taken that extra sanguinary mile. Bloodsucking, in various more or less metaphorical guises, is after all opera’s happiest place, and you could plausibly chart the whole shebang as a coterie of baleful figures (and not always men, forsooth: look at those hard-eyed hooker vamps Carmen and Manon) draining the life out of the saps who make the mistake of falling in their way. Indeed, if opera houses really want to pack the joints out with halfwit children of confused sexual identity,…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024

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