Covent Garden
the ballet on film……………
Leica M6, 35mm Summicron, HP5 (1600)
There is a particular circle of the Covent Garden inferno reserved for those of us who arrive at the Royal Opera House clutching a ticket we cannot afford, and it begins the moment you pass beneath that great glass atrium — a structure that resembles nothing so much as a Victorian railway terminus that has been to finishing school — and find yourself adrift in a sea of braying gilets and pashminas costing more than a small Hatchback. They come, these people, not to watch but to be: to murmur “of course one saw Nureyev” to a spouse who was demonstrably not yet born, to flourish a programme as though it were a Papal bull, and to glare at anyone whose dinner jacket betrays the faintest whiff of the rental shop. I joined them with the doomed enthusiasm of a man boarding the OceanGate’s Titanic submersible and took my seat in the amphitheatre — which is to say, a wooden pew positioned so far above the stage that the dancers appeared as agitated bacteria writhing on a distant Petri dish.
The ballet itself, I am reliably informed, was Swan Lake, though from my altitude it might equally have been a documentary about competitive standing or a public information film on the dangers of tights. A man in white tirelessly leapt about as if his gusset had been wired to the National Grid, periodically catching a quivering ballerina who had clearly been assembled from coat-hangers and existential dread, while the corps de ballet flapped in formation like a flock of constipated geese arguing over a single breadcrumb. The orchestra sawed away with the doomed persistence of men trying to start a flooded lawnmower, the audience emitted that peculiar moist sigh of the cultured ecstatic, and I sat there, paralysed, wondering at what precise point in human history we collectively agreed to pay a week’s wages to watch grown adults mime swans having a breakdown.
It was at this juncture that I committed my act of larceny, for I had smuggled in my Leica M6 — that fetish object of the photographic bore, a camera so revered that owning one is less a hobby than a minor religion. I set about stealing photographs in the venerable manner of the street photographer, by which I mean crouching like a gargoyle with gastric trouble and discharging the shutter, whose celebrated “whisper-quiet” click in fact detonated through the hushed auditorium like a rifle bolt at a Quaker funeral. An usherette descended upon me with the velocity of a plummeting peregrine, hissing that photography was strictly forbidden, and I was forced to conceal my £2,046 rangefinder beneath my coat while around me a hundred philistines openly filmed the entire third act on their telephones, undisturbed, unmolested, and apparently entirely beneath the institution’s notice.
Bruised but unbowed, I retreated at the interval to the celebrated rooftop bar, that glassy eyrie where the Opera House’s true performance takes place: the slow, theatrical fleecing of the customer. Here a glass of champagne — and I use the word “glass” loosely, for the vessel held roughly the volume of a contact lens — was offered at a price that suggested the grapes had been individually massaged by Carmelite nuns and flown first-class from Épernay on velvet cushions. I handed over my card with the resigned air of a man tipping the executioner, received in return a thimble of warmish fizz with all the effervescence of a stagnant pond, and stood admiring the floodlit rooftops of London while my bank account quietly haemorrhaged into the night like a stuck pig.
And there, dear reader, is the whole grisly transaction laid bare: an evening in which one pays through the nose to sit in the gods, to be scolded for the crime of operating a camera one has already remortgaged to acquire, and to toast the experience with carbonated battery acid at the cost of a fortnight in Benidorm. The swans died, the rich applauded, and I shuffled out into the Covent Garden drizzle feeling — as the truly cultured among us always do — thoroughly entertained, comprehensively robbed, and absolutely certain I would do it all again next season. For this, you understand, is art; and the first rule of art, as any habitué of the Royal Opera House will tell you, is that if it doesn’t leave you both spiritually elevated and financially eviscerated, you simply haven’t been charged enough
