What was that suggestion of the stripper Mazeppa in Gypsy?
“You can pull all the stops out
Till they call the cops out
Grind your behind till you’re bend.
But you gotta get a gimmick
If you wanna get a hand.”
Taking these words of wisdom to heart, English National Opera are plugging their new stage version of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant that opens at the Coli for seven performances only from September 16 with a poster and leaflet that offers the words “Sexual desire, Dominance, submission” in far larger typeface than that of the name of the piece itself.
The depressing thing is that the gimmick appears to have worked. The Sunday Times last week even rose to the bait with a headline of its own that could have come from The Sun: “Singing lesbians to rescue opera house”, it trumpeted.
Arts editor Richard Brooks reported below it, “The troubled English National Opera plans to sing for its survival with the world premiere of a new opera about lesbian lovers that features nudity and sex.”
Sex clearly sells; but John Allison, editor of Opera magazine, was reported at being dismayed at ENO’s use of it to do so. “This sort of marketing shows how desperate ENO has become. Obviously they know how hard contemporary operas are to sell, but it does smack of a stunt.”
Meanwhile, not to be outdone the Royal Opera House are also up to a stunt PR. Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West is being sold as if it were a Clint Eastwood film – it is being marketed under its English name, The Girl of the Golden West, with the slogan “opera’s very own spaghetti western.”
