Role reversal

Considering how close, if mysterious, the links are between being gay and loving opera, it could seem surprising that there are almost no operas explicitly on gay subjects. Many of Britten’s operas heave with homoerotic subtexts, but his only opera to come out is his last, Death in Venice, and that’s paedophiliac. Tippett, always wackier and more courageous, has a gay couple in The Knot Garden, but they’re tangential. There is Harvey Milk, but that is best forgotten. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, since what seems to appeal most to the gay sensibility is the suffering diva, suffering preferably both in life and art. Hence the uniquely high — and deserved — ranking of Callas, whose life was wretched and whose repertoire in her great years was almost exclusively 19th-century Italian, where there is the largest concentration of mad or dying women.

Still, it seems a good idea to try adapting one of the great standard operas, and clearly the one to go for is the rampantly straight Don Giovanni. That is what the distinguished playwright Ranjit Bolt has done, producing a clever and witty set of lyrics, which sound well even in the cavernous spaces of the main space in Heaven, London’s most famous gay club. The book, that is the complete text and adaptation of Da Ponte’s plot, is by David Collier, and is intended to be a critique of consumerism and the commodification of sexual partners: but obscurely that is blamed on the then Mrs Thatcher, whose image and voice open and close the opera, and seem to me quite irrelevant. Late capitalism may be to blame, but she hardly invented that.