encourage listeners to shoot gay men in the head. ‘Boom Bye Bye’ is the chorus of one such charming lyric. The home-grown evidence is just as harrowing. A Cockney thug imprisoned for four years after drunkenly attacking a gay man eventually acknowledges his homosexuality. This is one of the sorriest aspects of the problem. What inspires gay repression is sexual confusion. Kill off a gay man in the hope of killing off your gay self. Some of the hatred is less Freudian and arises from a thoughtless adherence to traditional practices, a sort of mob-rule of the mind. A Muslim teenager from Hull begins his tale by reporting that his unhappy mum has taken to drinking vodka ‘under the stairs’. He joins her down there and it’s a very happy little cubby-hole until he reveals his sexuality. Mum is too sozzled to care but Dad is incandescent, banishes the boy from the house and later stabs him. What’s astonishing is the understanding, the amused nonchalance with which the kid treats his father’s reaction. The entire anecdote is told by a sublime athlete, Ankur Bahl, who skips around the stage with amazing speed and agility as he relates his tale. The silver twine of the rope whirrs almost invisibly as he bobs and prances, and the effortless brilliance of his skipping, his acrobatic frivolity, becomes an emblem for his triumphant good humour, his attachment to essential human virtues, his indestructible happiness. That sounds terribly twee but this is an ovation-prompting performance. Newson’s show, with its small cast and collapsible sets, has a nomadic heart and has just completed a world tour. It deserves a second and if it rocks up near you give it a look. To launch a new fringe venue in the middle of a stock-market crash is to display a contempt for fiscal rectitude that borders on the poetic. Above the Stag is a blackbox theatre berthed in a Dickensian back-street in Victoria and its baptismal show features ten playlets by gay American writers. Some of the material is patchy but one of these pieces is a riveting short drama. The Black Eye by Jim Dalglish follows an ageing cruiser whose indulgence in every variety of sexual pleasure has sated his libido to the point of expiry. A chance encounter with a straight youngster tempts him to try out a new thrill, the conversion-seduction, but at the critical moment he deliberately sabotages his own efforts, knowing that even this novel excitement will leave him dissatisfied. The play has the feel of lived experience intelligently analysed and transfused with marvellous clarity into a dramatic lament on the perils of sexual anhedonia. This is a universal human topic which has provoked comment from three of the last century’s foremost sages. Beckett: ‘Habit is a great deadener.’ Stoppard: ‘What free love is free of is love.’ Lemmy: ‘If you get hit on the skull with a hammer at 7 every morning you eventually get used to it.’ q

Sarah Connolly as Romeo and Marie Arnet as Giulietta (on floor). Photograph by Bill Cooper

Opera A fine romance Michael Tanner

I Capuleti e i Montecchi Of thee I sing Opera North, Leeds Slightly perversely, Opera North has been running a series of ‘Shakespeare operas’ ending with Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which means that the programme book consists largely of articles explaining that the story doesn’t derive from Shakespeare at all. So what? I am inclined to ask, but themed series are ‘in’, though why anyone seeing Falstaff a year ago might feel more like going to Bellini’s great work I don’t see. The main thing is that Capuleti has indeed been done, and very finely. Musically it is virtually flawless and, if scenically it is wayward, the action is lucid and the central relationships powerfully and economically drawn. Leslie Travers’s sets suggest or embody collapse. No scenery for the first part aside from an askew glass chandelier,

which shatters deafeningly. Later on we have a huge perspex box, or room, hanging over Giulietta, with nebulous figures reflected in it, I think. And for the final scene there’s what appears to be a huge cracked cardboard egg. The time is the present, with all the characters dressed in drab working clothes. None of this, possibly surprisingly, impedes the performers, who are perfectly capable of enacting hatred and passion with or without bizarre visual stimuli. There is something of a mystery about Bellini’s finest operas. The means are invariably simple, but the effects are not only strong but also reward pondering. His central figures, in all his major operas, skirt round the happiness of love fulfilled but almost never achieve it. Romeo and Giulietta suffer from the obvious impediment of being officially enemies, but something about the exquisitely eloquent idiom in which they sing suggests that they might be at a loss if the bar to their happiness were removed. It seems appropriate that Romeo should mistakenly think Giulietta dead and so take poison just before she wakes up, because their wonderfully subtle portrayal by Bellini dooms them more decisively than any whim of fate. They are Wagnerianly ‘death-devoted’, but death in Bellini has no metaphysical connotations. However, I also tend to think that Bellini’s elegiac idiom doesn’t encompass erotic fulfilment, as opposed to palpitating anticipation or agonised regret. His characters sound happiest

58 THE SPECTATOR 8 November 2008 www.spectator.co.uk