If only there was an award for the best prize marrows and spuds on the operatic stage ...
Picture quality isn't great (you'll see better if you click on it) but if you look carefully, that's the Elizabeths' (I and II's) monogram spelled out in allotment veg.
If I'm honest, I'm not mad about Benjamin Britten but a cheap matinée ticket and historical curiosity tempted me to see his rarely-performed Gloriana, written for the Coronation.
Musically, I could take it or leave it. But what a spiffing production ...
The Queen arrived in a Dior New Look gown. (The young Queen Elizabeth II, that is, because Gloriana is a pageant within an opera. Or an opera within a pageant.)
There were schoolboys in grey shorts and soldiers in khaki and bossy ladies in cardigans, looking like Nella Last. (And maybe she did take up am-dram when she was at a loose end after the war.)
It reminded me of the village pageant in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts.
It seemed unfair that everybody got thunderous applause at the end except for the set designer.
I'm not sure that this was a very tactful choice for the Coronation ... would the new Queen really have relished seeing her predecessor bald, wig-less and schemed against?
I don't think she much likes opera. I've seen Prince Charles slip quietly into the royal box after the lights go down - and other royals occasionally in the posh seats - but never the Queen.
So I don't know whether she's been back to see this again. But I'm sure she'd find it more heaps more fun than the original.
2 comments:
I think the Queen prefers musicals. Didn't she famously go to see Oliver several times?
Now you say that, I seem to recall reading somewhere that she loved Oklahoma.
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