Red-hot stuff ... ENO's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Photograph: Sarah Lee
It's a sad sign of an artform that's on its uppers when you have to resort to desperate measures to attract the crowds.
Impresario Ellen Kent is touring those well-known opera companies the National Opera of Odessa and Chisinau National Opera, fresh from Ukraine and Moldova, and there is a hilarious advert peppering the weekend supplements.
It features a picture of some pouting eastern European lovelies who look as if they have been told to impersonate mail-order brides rather than operatic artists, with the not-very-thinly-veiled titillatory promise (sorry, "warning") that "some scenes contain nudity".
The production also features, the advert tells us, "a magnificent golden eagle". I've scoured my memory, and checked the Penguin Guide to Opera, for the presence of a magnificent golden eagle in the plot of Rigoletto, but I just don't recall one.
Anyway, Isla (bred by artificial insemination in Glasgow University, apparently), will be "starring" in the production, seven-foot wingspan and all, so she must have better vocal skills than average, since golden eagles tend to sound like a cross between a very small dog yapping and an anxious chicken.
It's not just Ellen Kent resorting to such peculiar tactics. When English National Opera advertised Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant last autumn with the tagline (if I recall aright) "Sexual desire, dominance, submission", I wondered why they didn't ditch the coyness and just go with "Dykes do S&M! Hot girl-on-girl action!" - it would hardly have been less homophobic.
Often enough promoters don't even need to make absurd claims for shows, since they tend to have carefully filleted press quotes to do it for them. Any confidence one may have had in such things was dashed for me when the advertising for Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story was headlined with the following: "'The best film ever, ever, ever' - the Guardian". Not, I discovered after a judicious archive search, from our film critic Peter Bradshaw (and heaven forfend that he should ever descend to such hyperbole) but to a semi-ironic fashion column, for Chrissake.
