There’s nothing transgressive about opera using sex to sell tickets

Fluffy bunnies. Human-size, pink and white fluffy bunnies. Twerking. The image has never left me, ever since an ill-fated date to see Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne in 2012. Over salmon during the damp interval, my date confirmed that he liked the bunnies, I didn’t. Having established myself as a purist and a prude, we parted ways.

Since the onslaught of arts cuts, opera-goers have had to harden themselves to scenes of sex and violence – the oldest trick in the book to ramp-up ticket sales. The bunnies hopped on to the stage in the same year that ENO unveiled their notorious Don Giovanni condom ad; two years before, the company had spiced up Mozart’s opera with a scene of suggested gang rape. Now, obliged to rent out the Coliseum over the summer, ENO is responding to demands that opera ‘adapt or die ‘ by wheeling out the Don once again this September, breathlessly promising ‘sex, sex and more sex’.