It was the launch of the ENO’s Opera season last Thursday. People settled themselves into their boxes, all extended neck and self-importance, honking and espying like the wintering geese returning to the bald fields of my home village. (It’s autumn. Everything takes a turn for the wistful.)

This opening night was a little different though. The curtain was as black and ominous as a pirate’s flag and on it was painted a massive green skull and crossbones warning of imminent toxicity. What could be toxic in this palace of refinement wondered I, less it were the poised pens of the press members lurking dangerously in the crowd?

The screen rose and there was a deafening blare from the orchestra pit. Was this the overture? I couldn’t readily identify the instrument. A contredatura contra-detuned bassoon? A duck quacker lodged in a saxophone in the key of z flat diminished shoved up a Wagner tuba’s ass? I panicked. It was an infernal, grating noise that was both familiar and strange and incredibly aggravating. Er yes, I finally realised it was 12 car horns blaring in unison. (A rather sublime idea as overtures go and a fine Monteverdi pastiche.)

Oh yes and meet Claudia, the main character to dominate this dystopic, perverse universe, which is lodged so brazenly in the velveteen lap of high opera. Our Claudia doesn’t say much, actually she doesn’t say anything, but she’s one big mamma - 25ft actually, of big fibre glass mamma. Each buttock is 2 metres high. As the evening progressed, singers erupted from her orifices and scrambled over her pasty voluminous thighs, erupted from her nostrils, spilled out from her ass and slid from behind the huge removable nipples of her pale sagging breasts which squashed dough-like against the stage. Lovers snuck into the darkness of her hollow breasts. Her enormous buttocks were removed to expose a twisted web of bloated intestines which were being massaged from within by spooky gloved black hands of the secret police. Invisible thronging crowds of dispossesed amassed in her abdomen. Pestilence, fire, time and constipation ravaged her. (There are more special effects in this production than ‘The Mummy’). She was graveyard, nightclub, palace, wasteland and bodily decay in one. She was in short, a piece of existential real estate.

In recent times the ENO has become an ever hotter hot bed of different bed fellows: Anthony Minghella, Kiaros Abbastami, Rupert Goold and, in this instance, the Catalan theatre company La Fura Dels Baus (with a few dance companies thrown in). These collaborations will result in radical reimaginings that will redefine the genre. Old and stuffy and minke-clad is out, or at the ROH. And as an opening to the season, the Grand Macabre was a bold statement of intent.
Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre as envisaged by the fiery La Fura Dels Baus, debuted in Brussels earlier this year. We haven’t seen it in Britain for 25 yeas. It’s a 1978 anti-anti-anti-pro-contra-politco-farco-up-yours-Boulez-with-fish-fork opera loosely based on a play by the Belgian surrealist Michel de Ghelderode. From the brief blaring overture to the mock of the closing Passacaglia (the third Passacaglia I’ve heard this week for some reason) the work is a sonic montage, name checking Beethoven, Rossini, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Verdi, Ella Fitzgerald, and, well, Thriller. The singing is both slapstick and superlative. The Chief of Police, Gepopo (Susanna Anderson with gravity-defying coloratura) and the chubby Prince Go Go (a superb Andrew Watts) were flamboyantly sublime and what clanked, honked, banged-like-a-bin lid, quacked and farted out of the pit was both breathtakingly cacophonous and anarchically imaginative. (The percussion list includes: hum pots, a pistol, a sauce pan, a wind machine, a tray full of crockery, a large alarm clock, a sledgehammer, a siren whistle, a steamboat whistle, a cuckoo whistle and an electric doorbell amongst other things.) The orchestra, under Baldur Bronnimann, seemed to grow in stature with the music. (I was glad because I had nearly dozed off during my last trip here to see Cosi).

Breughel-land’s royal fleshy dignitary bounced around on a child’s inflatable Space Hopper. Nekrotzar, the counter baritone Pavlo Hunka, "le grand macabre", who looked like Uncle Fester, claimed to have returned from the grave to devastate the earth and was dragged around this sorry planet by a drunk, pot bellied Piet, perched on Claudia’s removable toes, while the transvestite gibbering astrologer Astradamors prophesied that a comet spelled doom whilst he got spanked by his horny wife, Mescalina and fled in terror of her ‘spider’. Everyone, including the fatalistic Piet, is pissed, horny, large breasted, slutty and/or plain stupid, cursed by the narrowness of what it is to be human. Ironically the duets between Armando and Armanda (played by two sopranos, Frances Bourne and Rebecca Bottone) originally named Spermando and Clitoris who do nothing but shag and look for places to shag are some of the loveliest and most tender in the opera.

There is, naturlich, a political element. It’s a satire of the reign of terror and its incompetence. Ligeti was Hungarian. He lost many family members to concentration camps, was nearly deported to Russia and ended up at the Franz Liszt academy of music under the stultifying rule of the communists. He had endured both Fascism and Stalinism before he arrived in the West. So the terrifying demagogue, Nekrotzar turns out to be too much of an incompetent pisshead to bewitch a baked bean let alone rain down the powers of Satan upon the empty heads of Breughel land.

It was a great start to the season and proof that opera houses aren’t just velvet-lined microwaves reheating the canned goods of yesteryear.

photo credit: Stephen Cummiskey