Royal Opera House, London

Source: Bigstock

As the curtain went up on La Bohème, I guessed the point they were making almost immediately, and maybe I even agreed with some of the sentiment at the heart of it.

The lead tenor, the lead soprano, and the second lead soprano were black; many of the children in the crowd scenes were Asian; and there was a transvestite in the café scenes: a strapping six-foot bloke in stilettos dressed up as a woman in 19th-century Paris for no reason more obvious than the rest of the casting.

If you consider that La Bohème is about a group of penniless artistic types sharing a garret in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1830s, then when you realize that most of the main characters are, as well as being excellent singers, ticking minority boxes, along with many of the extras, then you kind of have your evening worked out before it gets started.

The producers wish to make a point at your expense. They are not just laying on some Puccini for your enjoyment. They are educating you. They are enlightening you. They are taking your money and they are using it to force-feed you some politics you didn’t really want on your evening out.

And they are doing this because they think they need to broaden your mind, the cheeky fuckers.

They assume that you, stupid theatergoer, are so prejudiced and narrow-minded that you need setting on the correct path even when you’re out in the West End for the evening.

It’s not that I couldn’t see there might be some well-intentioned ideas that might have driven the directors to make these choices. Whether it worked, on any level, educationally or artistically, was a different matter.

A few minutes in, I sank into my seat, feeling browbeaten, heaved a sigh, and thought, “Can we not just enjoy ourselves anymore? Do the educators have to get their hands on easy-listening opera as well?”

Let’s face it, Puccini is not high art. Puccini was no more high art in his day than, say, Justin Timberlake or Ed Sheeran is now.

Or as Benjamin Britten wrote in 1951: “After four or five performances I never wanted to hear Bohème again. In spite of its neatness, I became sickened by the cheapness and emptiness of the music.”

Yes, it’s infuriatingly catchy stuff, and I’ve a soft spot for it because my Italian grandfather used to sing it to me when I was a child, along with various belters in his Mario Lanza repertoire.

Puccini is harmless entertainment. It’s stirring to listen to and diverting to watch. It’s meant to be escapism. How the hell are you meant to escape when instead of being transported to 1830s Paris to watch a poor seamstress called Mimi fall in love with a poet called Rudolfo you are watching what looks like Porgy and Bess while listening to La Bohème?

I love Porgy and Bess. But is it too much to ask that when I go to see La Bohème it attempts to show you Mimi and Rudolfo falling in love in a Paris loft like they might be European circa 1830?

Yes, apparently it is. But let me ask this question: If I went to see Porgy and Bess, would the directors ever dare to cast white singers in the main roles? I don’t think so.

If you can’t cast white people in black roles anymore, you really should not cast black people in white roles, never mind increasingly.

This is what equality should mean, but it doesn’t.

And this is how we know we don’t have equality. We have a system of preference and reeducation. Reverse artistic apartheid.

Black actors and singers increasingly play white people, and they don’t make themselves seem in any way Caucasian when they do it either. Of course not. That would be disgustingly demeaning. For the performers of colour. Not the white audience.

They play the role as black, as for example when a black actress recently played Anne Boleyn in a British miniseries.

But could I, a white woman, walk into a casting session and demand to try out for the role of Shakespeare’s Othello? No, I could not, even though I could probably audition for Hamlet because they love gender-bending that one. But I cannot be Othello, and nor can any white man.

Blacking one’s face for a role—now seen as a despicable act—went out with Sir Laurence Olivier, although in those days his performance as Othello was hailed as genius and no one saw the makeup he wore as an insult to anyone.

Nor did anyone in the 1930s bang on about Merle Oberon being ethnic minority because she grew up in Mumbai of Sri Lankan and British parentage. Her agent would make her put that at the top of her CV to get roles now.

Anyway, there was I sunk down into my seat trying to work out how to enjoy La Bohème as it was intended—which is to say meaningless entertainment—while also appreciating these fantastically talented black singers from places like Illinois and South Africa.

They all sang tremendously well, and it was tear-jerking when Mimi finally caterwauled her last on her deathbed. So it worked fine, musically speaking. But it was absolutely visually confusing.

Says the English National Opera on its website, and I reproduce this with the incorrect punctuation and lack of capital letter: “La bohème is a timeless piece of opera which seeks to explore the themes of enlightenment, good versus’ [sic] evil, and friendship…” No it’s not! You idiots, with your crap grammar. It’s about nothing of the sort, and why should we take your word on anything when you can’t even write “versus” without making it possessive?

This is how intelligent these people are who think they are educating us.

You’re not meant to promote blasted “enlightenment” with Puccini. But let me say this, if you did want to make a point about racial equality with La Bohème, here is how to do it:

You rework the whole thing to set it in Harlem, or Downtown L.A., and you make it about a group of impoverished black artists, and one of them dying tragically, with no access to health care (just like Mimi in 19th-century Paris). That would be incredibly moving. I would go to see that. I would feel it had artistic merit.

What I do not think has artistic merit—and actually is pretty patronizing—is pretending black people lived as painters and philosophers and poets in lofts in Paris in 1830, or that if they did not, we need to get over it and pretend they did, retrospectively, in the name of offering some wonderful black singers equal opportunities to star in operas that don’t have black characters in them—presumably because Puccini was a rotten racist? I think that was the point they were making.

Oh, but it made the thing drag. The man in drag made it drag. I kept looking at the transvestite in the café scenes and thinking, “Is he there to reflect the fact there were colorful characters in 19th-century Paris, or is it about giving an actual tranny actor a chance? When he changes out of his costume, will he come out the stage door in another dress?”

To answer that, I have to mention that the man sitting next to me was a nonbinary person. He was male, I could see that, but he had long flowing hair and lipstick on, and women’s clothes.

There were quite a few transgender-looking people in the audience, so I kind of felt the word had gone out that this production was one for them.

Anyway, I got to the end of it and as I was sitting next to the friend who got me the ticket, I didn’t feel I could say anything other than “Wonderful!” as the curtain came down.

As the female conductor took a bow to rapturous applause—such a relief it wasn’t one of those awful macho charismatic male genius conductors who are ruining everything with their cis-normative nonsense—I clapped along. The transvestite sitting next to me hauled himself to his feet, all seven foot of him, as dainty ladies tend to.

My friend and I made our way out of the row of seats onto the steps toward the exits. And as we did so, a little chap in an anorak who had been sitting in front of us said very loudly: “Well, I don’t agree!”

Someone next to him must have asked him what he meant, and he said: “I don’t agree with all those black people in it. I mean, Paris didn’t look like that in the 19th century. It’s just not accurate. I had to close my eyes!”

It was as though this chap had come out of his flat in working-class Peckham, untouched by anything that has gone on for the past twenty years.

As he said what he said, I felt such a deep sense of panic—would it cause a riot in the theater?—that I shot up the stairs, pushing toward the exits as though my life depended on it. Pushing to get out like a fire had just started, I was.

The man from Peckham carried on complaining, and I could hear my friend chatting to him, politely saying she thought maybe things had to evolve, and maybe this was a good way of getting a new generation to enjoy opera… “Nonsense!” I could hear him say.

I kept pushing toward the door and found myself level with a lady of color, and, as we could hear the man complaining behind us, I felt I had to say something apologetic to her, so I said, “Oh dear, how awful.”

And she said: “Well, I suppose it’s good that people are asking questions and having a debate.”

I was flabbergasted. “Is it?” I said. She said: “Of course. I mean, we’re not there yet.”

I said: “Oh, I assumed we were there. I assumed we were very much there.”

And she said: “Where have you come from?” And she looked amused, like I had come out from under a stone.

“I live in Ireland,” I said, “but maybe I live in la-la land, because I thought all of this was decided, and something we could no longer question.”

She looked at me with disdain and said: “Enjoy la-la land!” She said it with venom. And then she flounced off.

So I guess I got the blame for white imperialism after all, even though I had tried my hardest not to defend it.