Hugh Mistake

I thought I was unembarrassable, at any rate with the lights out. ENO’s production of Kismet has proved me wrong. I sat blushing furiously and sweating, when I wasn’t struggling to keep my eyes open and head up. Anyone who thinks — and some people do — that artistic badness is merely a lack of artistic goodness should see this show and admit that they have been decisively refuted. It has every variety of ineptitude, and it isn’t easy to imagine who looked at the script and read the score and still decided it was performable; what is harder still to imagine is how it can ever have been a popular hit. In 1953 lyrics about the desirableness of living in Baghdad, what fun it is, merry and gay, and so on, wouldn’t of course have seemed out of place. It isn’t an access of PC that leads one to say they do now — Baghdad is as inevitably associated, for us, with horror and suffering as some other names, and it is hardly conceivable that those responsible for putting the show on would have thought that the contrast between the fun-exotic world that the word conjured up in 1953 would be piquant but amusing in comparison to how it registers now.