Last night I lasted about thirty minutes in to Mark-Anthony Turnage’s much hyped Anna Nicole. I quite liked the orchestral writing and Eva-Marie Westbroek was acting up a storm but in the end I just felt “meh”. Watching Tony Pappano’s doco on “fallen women” in opera that was meant to contextualize Anna Nicole I think I understand why. Turnage and his librettist are trying to do to “us” what Verdi did with La Traviata; challenge our hypocrisy at colluding in the creation of Anna-Nicole Smith while deploring her life. Doesn’t work for me. Until the opera came along I scarcely knew who she was. I hate the “cult of celebrity”. I despise everything about it and the people who feed off it so trying to guilt trip me over voyeuristic fascination in this particular specimen was doomed to fall flat. It did.

Also, not nearly so edgy as Turnage and company seem to think. The painfully fake Texas accents underlie what is, essentially, an assertion of British cultural superiority over the crass Americans. If the Royal Opera House wanted to make an opera about the cult of mindless celebrity and they had any balls they’d make it about the vacuity of Princess Diana and her family. Not much chance of that!