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Our team of near-embalmed reporters strives to present readers with new and exciting experiences . Today we proudly bring you an account of a cultural evening in Paris at which it seems porky the pig ran out of grunt and took the final plunge.
Our team of near-embalmed reporters strives to present readers with new and exciting experiences . Today we proudly bring you an account of a cultural evening in Paris at which it seems porky the pig ran out of grunt and took the final plunge.
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Australian Peter Burleigh, first introduced to our subscribers through one of his brilliant cartoons drawn for Broadside Magazine in 1969 , when he was studying architecture at Melbourne University (the editor of Broadside, Pete Steedman, is the subject of an ongoing series in Little Darwin which is likely to challenge the ABC's Blue Hills in length).
After too much social contact with Steedman , Burleigh found it difficult to think or draw a straight line even with a T-square , so he wisely took off for the Mother Country to expand his scholarly study of curves and crumbling ancestral piles.
In March this year , Burleigh was back in Paris, much older but none the wiser : an esteemed ex-architect with diverse interests such as new technology, writing fiction, travel, travel writing, film & screenplays, design, literature, fishing, dogs, opinions & people, Roman history, family and the Robin Hood sport of archery .
After too much social contact with Steedman , Burleigh found it difficult to think or draw a straight line even with a T-square , so he wisely took off for the Mother Country to expand his scholarly study of curves and crumbling ancestral piles.
In March this year , Burleigh was back in Paris, much older but none the wiser : an esteemed ex-architect with diverse interests such as new technology, writing fiction, travel, travel writing, film & screenplays, design, literature, fishing, dogs, opinions & people, Roman history, family and the Robin Hood sport of archery .
In his self-assumed role as an interpreter of culture for Australian audiences, he sent us the following review of an unforgettable performance at the Opera Garnier. ( His son , Marc, a naturalised French citizen and a journalist with Agence France Press ,was unable to attend the evening as he suddenly volunteered to go front-line reporting in Libya. Marc returned soon after , escorting the bodies of two photographers who had been killed in a Gadaffi mortar attack. Burleigh commented his son’s going off to war was an extreme way to avoid the opera .)
The inimitable review of the orgasmic evening reads thus ...
We have a box on the Port side of the stage. Our view of the action is somewhat limited, but we are up high and have a bird’s-eye-view of most of the set, which reproduces a corner of a dirty laneway somewhere in Russia. The brown and lime-coloured walls are peeling and paper litters the street. Scruffy apartment windows overlook the corner. Inside these windows people do things unrelated to the story, like leaning out and staring, scratching themselves, tentatively embracing, changing light globes or pretending to play a violin. It is pretty gloomy. By contrast, our box is lined with rich red felt and decorated with golden seraphim.
A few people hang about on the footpath, drinking vodka, looking miserable and shouldering life’s burdens. A very large wardrobe sits on the footpath, and soon a couple of people walk up to it, open the middle door and reveal stashed carafes of grog. They toss back a couple of glasses and put the carafes back. This wardrobe lends mystery to the performance and remains a mystery even after the heroine kills herself. I immediately recognise it as a symbol, perhaps of the Mystery of Life or the Loneliness of the Cabinet Maker.
Anyway, this young woman Katia Kabanova, who the Opera is named after, is arguing with her father and mother in the street. The people in the windows must be able to hear them but no one reacts. From Katia’s body language and stressed demeanour I can tell the argument is not a new one, and I guess the neighbours are used to such tantrums. Her father is a weak, balding man and struggles with an overdose of angst but not as much as she does. Katia’s sister slithers about the place, a twitching dysfunctional rocker, clearly drug-addled . She’s a bitch.
The old guy, who somehow turns out not to be Katia’s father but her husband, leaves for Siberia. Despite the departure of this overweight loser, Katia feels sure that doom is impending. She is right, the audience is becoming restless. Suddenly her mother reappears, grabs a drunk off the footpath and, mad with lust, drags him into a bedroom which we can’t see from our seats. At the appropriate moment the fountain gives an orgasmic squirt, getting the only laugh of the night.
Sorry, I forgot to mention the fountain. It sits in the middle of the roadway, obstructing any traffic intending to navigate the corner. Luckily no traffic appears during the performance. It has no water in it, save for a couple of brief orgasmic squirts. It takes a minute to work out what it is because it’s simply a few concentric brass pipes studded with spray heads. It seems heavy with symbolism because its ‘fountaining’ is limited to echoing the sexual climaxes of several characters, including Katia, and could have all the significance of a condom nailed to a nunnery door by Martin Luther or none at all.
Katia, whose mind is obviously deteriorating because her arm movements recall Joe Cocker in full flight has disappeared into the off-stage garden with Boris, another balding and aimless Russian man. They return after a discreet interval and a squirt of the fountain. He picks pieces of straw from her hair. Her load of guilt has increased tenfold.
The man responsible for this opera, Leos Janacek from Czechoslovakia, wrote the music based on a play by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. This is designed to be confusing to a black dog. All the time the cast sings about impending emotional ruin in Russia, French subtitles are flashed on the Proscenium. The two languages confuse my interpretation of the plot, so I ignore them and rely on my own innate appreciation of human nature. By this time a Tsunami of guilt is washing over Katia who seems unhealthily drawn to the fountain. Other characters appear from inside the wardrobe. Katia enters and reappears dressed like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Things are falling into place.
While self-recrimination flows, in the orchestra pit below us the conductor displays a depth of passion and action sorely missing on stage. The music is good, although there is a repeated signature sequence which emphasises on-rushing doom in case you missed it in the faces and gestures of the characters. Whenever Katia sings an intense soliloquy the other characters turn their faces to the walls. Boris, who is still hanging around, jams his head into the corner of the wardrobe.
One of the mysteries of the fountain is the dead goat lying in it. It sure looks like a dead goat to me. The word “peche”, which means “fish” in French, is sung often but no one looks into the fountain for fish or throws in a line. Alarmingly for the health of any fish in the fountain, the dead goat stays there for the entire performance. As a symbol of pollution in the Russian waterways it is quite effective, but Katia keeps wading in it and its imaginary water and may be suffering symbolic emotional pollution. It’s complicated.
Her evil sister and promiscuous mother now take a back seat in the plot, having succumbed to a plethora of sins (I learn later that in French “peche” also means “sin”, but luckily this doesn’t affect my appreciation of the plot).
Katia’s mind is now swirling like the storm clouds looming at the back of the set. The people standing in the windows and leaning against the walls slowly drift away or stagger off, leaving her and the symbols alone in the gloomy street. The “Wardrobe of Doom” has assumed the powers of the Tardis, time-shifting the characters into unseen dimensions but leaving the carafes of vodka untouched.
To the left of the stage, where our view is blocked, heavy footsteps suggest the cast members are queuing for glasses of Evian water or, indeed, vodka. There is no Interval in case the audience doesn’t return from the lobby. In our box there is an air of exhaustion.
When Katia sings that she can hear the feet of birds on the roof of her tomb, we know that the bats have finally got loose in her belfry. Clearly something devastating is about to happen, as if we didn’t know, and we wish it would hurry up. She steps into the fountain again, gesticulates at the sky and lies down dead. Boris spreads a coat over the cadavers of Katia and the goat.
The other characters are drawn out onto the street, magnetically attracted by misery and death, but are not upset at Katia’s suicide – and neither are we. Obviously it’s a common occurrence, on average once a week. The audience gives the slump-shouldered cast a standing ovation, either because the Opera is over or because the lead actress has killed herself. All in all, this is a fascinating cultural experience. The best thing about it is the Opera Garnier building itself, a spectacular Napoleonic confection of marble and gold.
***The cartoon at the head of this story was drawn by Peter Burleigh, for Broadside , a publication ahead of its time , which had a slightly longer season than Katia and the goat ; editor Pete Steedman operated out of an office not much bigger than a wardrobe during the Vietnam War period. At the end of Burleigh's review of Opera Garnier, the entire Little Darwin staff rose as one , shouted " Bravo!"-and got stuck into the absinthe like Toulouse Lautrec.
We have a box on the Port side of the stage. Our view of the action is somewhat limited, but we are up high and have a bird’s-eye-view of most of the set, which reproduces a corner of a dirty laneway somewhere in Russia. The brown and lime-coloured walls are peeling and paper litters the street. Scruffy apartment windows overlook the corner. Inside these windows people do things unrelated to the story, like leaning out and staring, scratching themselves, tentatively embracing, changing light globes or pretending to play a violin. It is pretty gloomy. By contrast, our box is lined with rich red felt and decorated with golden seraphim.
A few people hang about on the footpath, drinking vodka, looking miserable and shouldering life’s burdens. A very large wardrobe sits on the footpath, and soon a couple of people walk up to it, open the middle door and reveal stashed carafes of grog. They toss back a couple of glasses and put the carafes back. This wardrobe lends mystery to the performance and remains a mystery even after the heroine kills herself. I immediately recognise it as a symbol, perhaps of the Mystery of Life or the Loneliness of the Cabinet Maker.
Anyway, this young woman Katia Kabanova, who the Opera is named after, is arguing with her father and mother in the street. The people in the windows must be able to hear them but no one reacts. From Katia’s body language and stressed demeanour I can tell the argument is not a new one, and I guess the neighbours are used to such tantrums. Her father is a weak, balding man and struggles with an overdose of angst but not as much as she does. Katia’s sister slithers about the place, a twitching dysfunctional rocker, clearly drug-addled . She’s a bitch.
The old guy, who somehow turns out not to be Katia’s father but her husband, leaves for Siberia. Despite the departure of this overweight loser, Katia feels sure that doom is impending. She is right, the audience is becoming restless. Suddenly her mother reappears, grabs a drunk off the footpath and, mad with lust, drags him into a bedroom which we can’t see from our seats. At the appropriate moment the fountain gives an orgasmic squirt, getting the only laugh of the night.
Sorry, I forgot to mention the fountain. It sits in the middle of the roadway, obstructing any traffic intending to navigate the corner. Luckily no traffic appears during the performance. It has no water in it, save for a couple of brief orgasmic squirts. It takes a minute to work out what it is because it’s simply a few concentric brass pipes studded with spray heads. It seems heavy with symbolism because its ‘fountaining’ is limited to echoing the sexual climaxes of several characters, including Katia, and could have all the significance of a condom nailed to a nunnery door by Martin Luther or none at all.
Katia, whose mind is obviously deteriorating because her arm movements recall Joe Cocker in full flight has disappeared into the off-stage garden with Boris, another balding and aimless Russian man. They return after a discreet interval and a squirt of the fountain. He picks pieces of straw from her hair. Her load of guilt has increased tenfold.
The man responsible for this opera, Leos Janacek from Czechoslovakia, wrote the music based on a play by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. This is designed to be confusing to a black dog. All the time the cast sings about impending emotional ruin in Russia, French subtitles are flashed on the Proscenium. The two languages confuse my interpretation of the plot, so I ignore them and rely on my own innate appreciation of human nature. By this time a Tsunami of guilt is washing over Katia who seems unhealthily drawn to the fountain. Other characters appear from inside the wardrobe. Katia enters and reappears dressed like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Things are falling into place.
While self-recrimination flows, in the orchestra pit below us the conductor displays a depth of passion and action sorely missing on stage. The music is good, although there is a repeated signature sequence which emphasises on-rushing doom in case you missed it in the faces and gestures of the characters. Whenever Katia sings an intense soliloquy the other characters turn their faces to the walls. Boris, who is still hanging around, jams his head into the corner of the wardrobe.
One of the mysteries of the fountain is the dead goat lying in it. It sure looks like a dead goat to me. The word “peche”, which means “fish” in French, is sung often but no one looks into the fountain for fish or throws in a line. Alarmingly for the health of any fish in the fountain, the dead goat stays there for the entire performance. As a symbol of pollution in the Russian waterways it is quite effective, but Katia keeps wading in it and its imaginary water and may be suffering symbolic emotional pollution. It’s complicated.
Her evil sister and promiscuous mother now take a back seat in the plot, having succumbed to a plethora of sins (I learn later that in French “peche” also means “sin”, but luckily this doesn’t affect my appreciation of the plot).
Katia’s mind is now swirling like the storm clouds looming at the back of the set. The people standing in the windows and leaning against the walls slowly drift away or stagger off, leaving her and the symbols alone in the gloomy street. The “Wardrobe of Doom” has assumed the powers of the Tardis, time-shifting the characters into unseen dimensions but leaving the carafes of vodka untouched.
To the left of the stage, where our view is blocked, heavy footsteps suggest the cast members are queuing for glasses of Evian water or, indeed, vodka. There is no Interval in case the audience doesn’t return from the lobby. In our box there is an air of exhaustion.
When Katia sings that she can hear the feet of birds on the roof of her tomb, we know that the bats have finally got loose in her belfry. Clearly something devastating is about to happen, as if we didn’t know, and we wish it would hurry up. She steps into the fountain again, gesticulates at the sky and lies down dead. Boris spreads a coat over the cadavers of Katia and the goat.
The other characters are drawn out onto the street, magnetically attracted by misery and death, but are not upset at Katia’s suicide – and neither are we. Obviously it’s a common occurrence, on average once a week. The audience gives the slump-shouldered cast a standing ovation, either because the Opera is over or because the lead actress has killed herself. All in all, this is a fascinating cultural experience. The best thing about it is the Opera Garnier building itself, a spectacular Napoleonic confection of marble and gold.
***The cartoon at the head of this story was drawn by Peter Burleigh, for Broadside , a publication ahead of its time , which had a slightly longer season than Katia and the goat ; editor Pete Steedman operated out of an office not much bigger than a wardrobe during the Vietnam War period. At the end of Burleigh's review of Opera Garnier, the entire Little Darwin staff rose as one , shouted " Bravo!"-and got stuck into the absinthe like Toulouse Lautrec.
