UFO Info Week-End

The amount overpaid of 3p has been allocated to our account and I am to be contacted about the interest in the near

The amount overpaid, of 3p, has been allocated to our account, and I am to be contacted about the interest in the near future.
Yours faithfully,Iain MacLarenHonorary TreasurerThames Tradesmen’sRowing ClubLondon, W4. At all times there were two fully armed security men in the chorus, dressed in 18th-century costume, bristling with guns and unable to sing. Still, the judge’s friends, as we called them, did learn the words and mouthed them along with the others …”Now, I challenge you to think of any other branch of the performing arts where such a crazy situation could be thought passably normal and where the inmates come to think of their fantasy world as the real world.”I couldn’t Apart from the House of Commons, of course.. Now, although the soloists are all professional over there, the chorus is composed of amateurs.

One of the keenest amateur singers is, or was then, a local judge. Every time he featured in a production, he had to be accompanied by at least two bodyguards wherever he went, including on stage, so the bodyguards also had to put on operatic costume and go out in the chorus with him, to make sure he was not shot at. Opera is fantasy, so their lives become fantasy as well, or at least they come to apply different standards of logic to life. Jeremy Isaacs really, genuinely believed that a fly-on-the-wall documentary would do the Royal Opera House a favour He told Melvyn Bragg so on Radio 4.

He told him it would show the public how they are now balancing the books and getting their money’s worth. As the programmes are showing the exact opposite this suggests either that Isaacs is round the bend or working in a world where normal rules do not apply.”I’ll tell you a story,” my friend continued “I briefly worked with the Belfast Opera for a season. The reason that such things happen is that opera is a crazy world and the people tend to become the same. If it were not a programme about opera but a new sitcom, then obviously it was worth watching And I watched, and people were right It was a very funny programme The plot was unbelievable, of course. In real life an opera house would not make the crass mistake of hiring the same designer to design two productions opening at about the same time. In real life they wouldn’t make their leading dancer do a dress rehearsal on a floor so slippy that she kept falling over, nor would she in real life be called Darcey Bussell. In real life they wouldn’t spend thousands of pounds just getting two shire horses on stage for a Janacek opera …”Oh, yes, they would,” I was told by a friend who had worked in opera for a year or two before returning to theatre production “Things like this are always happening.