Skin Deep
Opera North
Verdi’s Requiem
Barbican
It takes a brave person, or more likely couple, to attempt an operetta which effectively satirises contemporary fads, and the more obvious the target the more difficult to pull off the satire with the requisite degree of scathingness. David Sawer and Armando Iannucci have taken cosmetic surgery, and while they are about it have intelligently enlarged the matter to prolonging rejuvenated lives (this is a co-commission of Opera North, the Bregenz Festival and the Royal Danish Opera). Skin Deep is set, for the first two acts, in the Swiss Alps, and concerns the practices of Dr Needlemeier, so I take it that the reference is to Dr Niehans, who injected many distinguished patients with sheep’s testicles, among them Pius XII, Churchill and Somerset Maugham, who attended his clinic in Clarens.
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