Eye Surgery at Opera Holland Park

Eye surgery at Opera Holland Park and Other Distractions

The temporary structure erected in Holland Park for a couple of months every summer has the feeling, if not the roundness, of a circus big top. It is set up against the side of Milord Holland’s C17 mansion, partly ruined, partly still used. This is the 1,000-seat arena for Opera Holland Park. 

There’s a stout roof. But otherwise some of the elements (temperatures, hot or cold, and storm noise) can intrude.

So can helicopters. On my recent visit, a police helicopter (I assume none other would be permitted) came and squatted on its aerial haunches above the Park for several minutes, successfully challenging both singers and orchestra. Doubtless the thick woods of the Park provide good escape cover for villains doing their business in the very prosperous surrounding streets…

Some unconscious urge made me buy tickets for a double bill of short operas, including Tchaikovsky’s Iolante. When that started to unfold its plot, I realised the deep connection. It’s an opera about eye-surgery! And there was I, at the time on anxious track for my own eye surgery at Moorfield’s Eye Hospital a few weeks thence.

So: forget the Opera’s religiosity, the Neo-Platonism, the Theosophy (all according to the programme notes). In non-philosophic summary, the libretto insists that blindness may be cured by a yearning for God’s light, for the Spirit within can overcome the body’s infirmity, assisted of course by the blossoming love between the principals.

My eyes (one good, one operable) were only for the suave Surgeon, gravely sung, who promises the cure for the heroine’s natal blindness, but only if she wishes for sight (which she has never known).

Enough of those psychosomatic distractions, I thought. I thrilled to the surgeon’s donning of the emblematic white gown, to the clever stage suggestion of operating instruments, to the inevitable bright shining ocular light, to the Surgeon’s success!

Tchaikovsky’s opera was music to my eyes.

Less enthralling was my neighbour in the auditorium.

He came back after the interval, at the last moment, with his phone pressed to his ear. As he sat down the orchestra struck up. Still on the phone- waiting it seems, for now a tinny voice could be heard (quite clearly by me). People began to turn their heads, and shush. My neighbour shot back in a stage whisper: “I’ve lost my card!”.

The tinny voice now said “I need to ask some security questions..”, which it then did, a couple. To both of which my neighbour (whom I had ceased to love as myself) muttered, “I don’t know”. By now a minute or so of Tchaikovsky’s score had been played. A fruity voice roared sotto voce from a few seats away: “Turn off that damned phone!”. To which my unloved neighbour hissed back: “I’ve lost my card – show some consideration!” (His exact words).

By now the owner of the tinny voice had realised the location of his customer. He said, drawing the call to a blessed close, “I’ll block the card and call back later”.

As for my unloved neighbour – what a nerveless creep for bringing his distress call into the auditorium.

My neighbour on the other side was a source of different concern. He was very old, very shrunken, and very frail- someone who on first sight prompted fears of an incipient medical emergency. He scarcely stirred before, or during, the performance. At the interval, he rose with great difficulty and immediately became stranded at the end of the row, clinging to a seat back. It was clearly impossible for him to negotiate any of the steps down to the exit amongst the descending interval crowd.

He was back in his seat for the second half. His companion, wife or sister or friend, who was only marginally more mobile, took the decision to send him on his slow way some moments before the end, in order to avoid the plain risks of exit torrents.

August 2019