The Blair witch-hunt project that Italy had to ban
A controversial production, which was cancelled by Italy's leading opera house because of its vicious lampooning of world leaders, is to be staged in London.
The new production of Candide which features attacks on Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi is being brought to London by the embattled English National Opera (ENO), as the company attempts to demonstrate its cultural cutting edge.
The British Prime Minister and the US President are represented by actors in cartoon-style masks, cavorting drunkenly in their underpants at a beach party.
They are joined by the "deposed kings" ( Putin, Berlusconi and Chirac) as they dance and sing a barcarolle, or folk song, in the comic operetta that was abandoned by Milan's La Scala.
The ENO, which is based at the Coliseum theater in London, is in the middle of a painful round of redundancies and faces a grant cutback that could extinguish it altogether. The daring production of Leonard Bernstein's musical version of Voltaire's classic 18th-century morality tale began its life last year in Paris, where it won rave reviews, only to become embroiled in a censorship row in January, when La Scala dropped the show.
The theater management denied that the decision had been prompted by the parody of the former Italian Prime Minister, Berlusconi. It claimed that Candide was dropped because it was not "in line with artistic programming".
Nevertheless a spokesman admitted that the theater had asked for the satirical sequence to be cut. The request, the spokesman said, was not initially accepted by Robert Carsen, the Canadian director of the lavish production, as the decision to axe Candide at such a late stage would have cost La Scala more than GBP800,000 ($1.6 million).
Eventually the director and La Scala came to an agreement and the show should now be staged in Milan this summer, before it goes on to London.
Bernstein composed the operetta in 1956. It was intended as a satirical comment on the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and on the anti-communist "witch hunts" mounted in the previous decade by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Carsen's re-imagining, which was a joint venture by the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, La Scala and the ENO, is based on the idea of the loss of American innocence.
Candide's castle home has been modelled on the White House and Westphalia is renamed "West-Failure". The evils through which the oblivious central character, Candide, travels in his "best of all possible worlds" include burning forests, refugee crises and rampant pollution, while in the contentious three-minute "beach party" scene the five world leaders are seen dancing on inflatable mattresses on an oil slick.
A spokesman for the Coliseum said Carsen is now working with the ENO to develop some more updated twists for a British audience.
He also admit that the plot might have to be changed if Blair and some of the other political figures featured have left office before the curtain goes up again.
The Guardian
(China Daily 04/24/2007 page19)
