Opera.

No, not that wonderfully pointless web browser.

Opera, as an art form is an acquired taste, like Marmite. When given the choice of going to the Opera or chewing your own feet off before pouring honey all over yourself and unleashing the legion of man-eating ants to finish the job off, you can pretty guess which one they go for.

Which explains why you only ask people to go, whom you don’t like.

You see, the whole thing about it, is that when it’s mentioned, you instantly have thoughts of heavily obese people bellowing out or “singing” words in some nasty foreign language, about someone dying or eating a pie, who knows, it’s in a foreign language. The high notes are hit so often, that the glass factory twenty miles away self destructs.

Not so long ago, I was asked if I wanted to go to see a production in the center of town and use it as an excuse to dress up like a homeless person.

Now, this was as the result of asking countless people it seems, all of whom would prefer the aforementioned ant fate except for myself. Personally, if you’re going to laugh and berate something, you have to at least experience it once. Except for things like Bungee Jumping or jumping out of a plane. Remarkably, it’s very easy to laugh at those things while on the ground drinking a bambochino or whatever new drink Starbucks has invented in the last 60 seconds.

So one grey evening in London town, my companion and I made our way in our Saturday best to the location where various people would be on stage, performing something called Faust. I have to be honest here, I had no idea what the story was before going, it’s of course very easy to go onto the Internet and find out what happens to everything before it’s even been done.

But I decided not to, so it was all new to me and I was very unsure as what to expect.

The London Palladium, where it was all taking place, was a truly grand place, all original fittings still in place, all well kept, and it was kind of like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside than the outside. As some of us fail to understand what is going on sometimes, it seems the venue saw fit to have a board where parts of the show had subtitles just in case you had no clue what they were singing.

Which occurred quite often and as a result your head bobs up and down looking at the stage and looking at the text like your just agreeing to everything a friend is saying without you having a clue what they are saying to you. As for the story, this is what I understood to be going on;

A bloke called Faust had enough of everything and after seeing visions of a woman, saw fit to spend 20 minutes saying he was going to kill himself. Then the devil comes along and offers him naughty in exchange for his soul, you know, the usual Devil taking soul scene.

People go to war, come back, Faust does naughty and gets the mystery woman pregnant. This annoys everyone which leads to great amounts of feeling bad, and basically all things go down the crapper for the woman who had naughty. The church comes into it all somehow in a bit where lots of people sing, and afterwards The devil and Faust wander round a bit, try and save the woman at some point because she killed her child and then Faust Dies at the end. Woman is off to heaven and the devil sort of goes away.

That’s about as much as I came away with the exception of some parts. You see, there was the whole idea of the shame of men and women doing naughty then being a single parent, with lots of people judging you all. The thing is, these days it’s such a common occurrence, would anyone actually feel shame? Also half way through, the whole thing turned into a big celebration of Christianity, where the woman with the baby went to the church for forgiveness.

And after she kills her baby, instead of leaving prison with Faust and the Devil, she goes to heaven. What the f**k? She killed her child and goes to heaven?

Sounds like an episode of the Jeremy Kyle Show.

But in reference to the spectacle, the whole thing was actually more entertaining than I’d ever consider it to be, the production values were considered to be very high, with the story being set during the early 20th century as opposed to whenever it was meant to be set, and also the performance was all in English, which finally gave the special people among us (or me) a chance to enjoy and understand it all, though let’s be fair, still needed the subtitles.

Also it seemed that people had problems listening or remembering what was just said as many lines were in fact repeated twice, and the warble when the devil sang “sort of”, borderline comical! But it was a different experience to normal shows you would see in the West End, and one I would encourage more people to see, if only the prohibitive expensive of it wasn’t an issue.

It was also surprising to here that after commenting on the fact I had gone, that other people had said they always wanted to go as well. The problem here is, I suspect it’s not up-most in people’s minds as an activity to do, which given some of it had huge cultural bearing on things many years ago, is a shame to miss out.