Opera review: The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak

My admittedly rare trips to opera haven't exactly been a famous success, but I guess there's something inevitable about me finally "getting" and opera when it involves puppets and probable cannibalism. Wattle and Daub's The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak, with music and libretto by Tom and Tobi Poster, is inspired by a true story, and something of a medical mystery, from 18th century France. A young man known only as Tarrare had a constant hunger, and a bizarre digestive system that allowed him to swallow almost anything in an attempt to satisfy it. He smelled bad, never gained weight, and was a subject of fascination to surgeon Baron Percy, who tried everything he could think of to cure him but failed - the framing device is his autopsy, in which Percy is searching for a golden fork Tarrare said he swallowed and was the cause of his death - but which was never found.

Non-review: Pleasure

Obviously, I can't make any kind of claim to actually be able to review an opera: I know nothing about them and have only ever seen a handful - there's far too much theatre to keep up with without adding opera and ballet to the mix regularly. But the Lyric Hammersmith are hosting a couple of touring productions from the Royal Opera, and Mark Simpson's Pleasure stars Lesley Garrett as a toilet attendant in a Northern gay club; and if that sort of thing isn't enough to at least make you curious you're probably in the wrong place. Simpson is apparently the only person ever to have won both BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Young Composer of the Year, and his music here mixes somewhat discordant strings with occasional hints of synthesizer, reminiscent of Peter Davison-era Doctor Who when the entire score was done on a Casio keyboard.

Non-review: American Lulu

I would have probably not classified this as a review anyway, as I know far too little about opera to pass comment on it on my very rare ventures. But it's even more so the case for American Lulu, Olga Neuwirth's adaptation of Alban Berg's opera, itself based on Frank Wedekind's plays. The trouble is I don't know the latter, so I didn't have foreknowledge of the story, and I'm not much better informed of it now. It's about a... prostitute? Maybe? I can't say I noticed her specifically having sex for money, but she does seem to have a pimp, so maybe she's a prostitute. Or she could have been the Duchess of Argyle. In any case lots of men fancy her, and continue to pursue her despite the fact that most of them seem to end up dead. She also confesses to poisoning someone's mother, which was the first I knew that he had a mother, let alone that she'd been poisoned. On reflection, I'm fairly sure she isn't the Duchess of Argyle.