Flashmob: The Opera

Last night, as noted on the linklog and all over this morning’s Metro, there was a flashmob in central London: the self-explanatory Pillow Fight Club.

As a high-concept gag, it looked fun. Far more interesting, though, was whatBBC Three did with flashmobs last night. Last night they put on an opera at Paddington station.

You know what? It turned out to be alright.

I watched Flashmob: The Opera, by which I mean that I saw it on TV, not that I turned up myself as part of the mob. It lasted under an hour, and only really involved the mob for the very end of the climactic number.

But it did work.

The conceit was not just that this was a drama interacting with a real space, although it was that too, with the characters trailing about the station waiting for their trains and arguing on the concourse (an engaged couple, Mike and Sally, fall out over football, and she is picked up by a lothario). Thereal conceit was that this was opera for football crowds.

More about that in a second. First an overview of the key creative decisions involved.

First (and I must say I was initially disappointed by this), the music consisted entirely of well-known arias, with a couple of choruses thrown in. I had a nasty feeling this was going to be Hooked on Classics all over. It wasn’t, largely because the English libretto had been written so well and so wittily (by Tony Bicat). The opening line of the piece was “What a plonker!”, and the tone was set from there.

The first act was pretty stodgy, with the characters separated and a surprisingly large amount of the performance prerecorded (noticably Mike’s rendition of La donn’e mobile on his tube journey).

Incidentally, this was I suspect a moment where life had let down the art a little. Mike was cast as a Charlton fan, and Charlton were, until a couple of months ago, the home of Paulo Di Canio. I’m sure Mike’s opening lines were originally meant to be the chant based on La donn’e mobile that used to accompany Di Canio on trips to Liverpool:

‘We’ve got Di Canio; you’ve got our stereo’

Anyway, things got rather better at half-time, not least because the producers did their best to play up the football theme: veteran commentator Barry Davies gave the half-time analysis. As throughout, this maximised the sense of a football audience meeting opera, rather than opera being brought to a football audience. This also explains the choice to show the piece on populist BBC Three rather than artsy BBC Four.

In the second half the atmosphere grew with the flashmob, who had evidently been asked to arrive for about two-thirds of the way through the performance. It all moved swiftly towards a conclusion with Sally being persuaded to catch the train to sin and Swindon, while Mike failed to grab her attention with a rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’.

Cue the flashmob, circling Mike, blasting out a quick chorus, and sending Sally scurrying back towards her one true love. It was a very basic story tricked out with frills and ruffles (Mike is confronted by an argumentative chorus of Chelsea supporters; there is some business with the carousel in a sushi bar), but that’s what you get with opera.

In the end I think it worked for two reasons:

First, the choice of popular pieces rather than original music was made to work by emphasising that these pieces are part of the popular consciousness. It felt perfectly sensible to hear a Chelsea gang hammering out the Anvil Chorus, and it was probably ‘Nessun dorma’ that gave the piece its football theme in the first place.

Second, I’m a complete and utter sucker for found choruses. The flashmob chorus at the end, a motley bunch of commuters, students and web-types, gave a decent account of themselves and Mike had the nous to look astonished as they accompanied him.

In short, the performance was cleverly angled to take best advantage of its own peculiarities: everything in it was defined by the twin poles of flashmobbing and opera.

Clever, successful, and definitely unrepeatable.