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Telegraph

I would pay not to go to Thatcher the Opera

Oh. My. Goodness. Can you think of anything weirder than Mrs T , an opera based on the premiership of Margaret Thatcher? But that's what's in store. It's the centenary of her birth this year and so someone had the genius idea of commissioning an opera, presumably on the basis that if a musical worked for Eva Peron – why not Mrs T, the opera ? I'm thinking of a succession of pussy cat bows, statement handbags and firm coiffures for the mezzo soprano in the title role, Lucy Schauffer. And I am longing to see who gets cast as Denis. But an opera is musical drama. It's not history. When it is history, like say, Mind you, the composer, Joseph Phibbs, is not one for the rollicking, singalong melody. I think we're safe betting that the audience won't come out of the production, humming the tunes. The librettist is Dominic Sandbrook, the historian and one of the two There's nothing particularly discordant about the combination of Mrs Thatcher and classical music in itself. She wasn't a philistine, though she did once tell The Guardian that she particularly liked Handel on account of 'all those marvellous tunes'. Miriam Gross wrote a fascinating essay in The Oldie about researching her musical tastes and it turned out that she told Isaiah Berlin that she once took part in the Oxford university production of Prince Igor. Whaddya know? Plus she was in the university Bach chorus. But the trouble with opera is that there isn't much room for nuance. It's good on murder, suicide, passionate trysts and dying of consumption and incarceration in a pyramid. It would be less good on policy arguments about privatisation, Commons debates and party conferences, though I can see that there's scope for good chorus action in a depiction of the miners' strike. An operatic character is either bad or good, like a cartoon, because the music has to send out a message; he or she is rarely a matter of light and shade. And Mrs T was a complex and interesting character; she was divisive and combative and destructive in many of her policies, but she was also kind, principled and rather religious. Dominic Sandbrook is too good an historian to be partisan, to give us a caricature, but there's a limit to what the form will allow. I am, therefore, rather dreading Mrs T, the opera . It is unlikely to work as opera and it can't work as history. It may however be good fun.