After the first week of Come Bargain With Uncanny Things, I just wanted to write a short manifesto of a core concept.
To the victory of cake.
Come Bargain With Uncanny Things is fun. It’s not for everyone - certainly not the person who left at the interval for a train, and then went on to write a review - but it’s most certainly designed for the entertainment of some people who like fantasy, stories about the edge of the world, and communities.
That is to say, in my normal mantra of “cake, not vegetables” (i.e. opera shouldn’t be a good-for-you, but a want-to-eat), Come Bargain With Uncanny Things is more or less cake.
With some pretty wholesome fruit in it, admittedly.
But if we’re talking about funding opera, making something for a market, not just for art, can cause interesting results.
Puccini’s industrialists paid for a different opera to Mozart’s emperor.
This opera wants to be paid for by its audience. That’s all.
It’s why we’ve got to produce cake for the audience to eat (as you can see in their reviews). Come along, play at doing magic, while also exploring what it is do be one of a community among some gorgeous opera.
And artistically, I think that's worth it, because its' forced us to focus on what we're communicating and for who.
Thanks to all of you - from performers and production team to audiences - for having been a part of it.
