[James]

Glyndebourne is reaching out to twentysomethings with its new operatic thriller Tangier Tattoo. What did post-punk rockers the Suffrajets make of it? By Tom Service

Tuesday October 25, 2005
The Guardian

Glyndebourne Touring Opera had a big idea for this autumn: the world premiere of an opera for what they describe as the "lost generation" of 18- to 30-year-olds. "Lost", that is, to the opera house, since twentysomethings make up only a tiny percentage of the average operatic crowd, which is still dominated by a greying, elderly population. This is the third youth opera that Glyndebourne have put on in the past few years, after Misper (written specifically for young teenagers), and Zoë (an opera on cloning), for sixth-formers. They've used the same creative team of writer Stephen Plaice and composer John Lunn for the new piece, Tangier Tattoo. It is billed not as a boring old "opera" but an "operatic thriller", and it's a tale of drugs, sex, terrorism and skin decoration, subjects that emerged from focus groups as the most likely to turn on the target audience................

.........Alex tell me that the staging reminds her of the scene in the latest Big Brother series, when the housemates had to improvise a musical. Alex's prescience is astonishing, since the first people we see at the interval reception are Derek and Eugene from Big Brother, brought along presumably to add some media glamour to the Glyndebourne crowd.

The girls seem more excited by Eugene than Tangier Tattoo, but perhaps that's understandable: how could any opera compete with the sight of the most unlikely sex-god in Britain? Alex says that for all its problems, the show may be working. "Before all this, I thought that operas and musicals were totally different things, like the difference between pop and classical. But I'm not so sure now." Maybe, just maybe, Tangier Tattoo is breaking down some boundaries...........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/featu...599804,00.html