Trusting to instinct

This year is Opera Holland Park’s tenth anniversary season, and to my great shame I have never attended a performance, despite having had the best intentions of doing so for roughly the past ten years. If I don’t turn up this summer, I get the feeling I’ll be in serious trouble with the two men who were sitting on the other side of the lunch table from me a few days ago, Michael Volpe and James Clutton. At least I will be if I survive the fusillade of their rattle-attack enthusiasm without slumping into my salad, lethally punctured by a hail of conversational bullets.

They give seriously good schtick, this double act, so much so that there’s a danger of them coming over as almost too practised, with their feed-a-line, pick-up-a-line vaudeville style of overlapping delivery. But when you get a word in edgeways the response is fast, intuitive and to the point.