Jealousy can make you nasty. Set for Robben Island, ferries at Cape Town’s Waterfront were loading passengers who had been able to fork out R1 250 to watch Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, on the island. For most Capetonians, watching the event on a big-screen television at a distant athletics stadium seemed the only option. The green grass on the pitch matched the envious mood.
This was a pleasant fiction. Having realised that not everyone can afford the hefty price to the event, the City of Cape Town and the University of Cape Town had organised a live screening of the opera event at Green Point Track.
The audience was encouraged to bring blankets and picnicking paraphernalia and prepare to lie under the stars and bask in front of big-screen television radiance.
Would a live broadcast be the same as being there? Doubt was beginning to set in as “pre-event” speeches explained why we were at the stadium and not the island. There was a delay with starting the event as we waited for the last ferry load to dock on the island. R1 250 secured a ferry meal, a souvenir of Robben Island, refreshments and a printed programme.
Eager publicists kept insisting that all this was exciting, but people in Green Point were turning green with envy.
With the delays taken care of, the opera started with Bongani Tembe entering the Robben Island stage in a prison warder’s uniform. This was a modern interpretation of the 1814 story of individual courage winning against state repression. Fidelio (a woman disguised as a boy) came to the prison in search of her husband who had been a victim of political tyranny.
There is something about this opera that seems to set it apart from the frivolity so common in the genre.
Fidelio starts off with an almost humorous domestic scene and ends with an emotional political symbolism. After a few minutes into this drama it did not seem to matter what the vantage point was. The audience on the island and those in front of the big television screens seemed to be equally absorbed in Fidelio‘s quest.
Robben Island was the perfect setting for the story, but the blanket of exclusivity over the whole affair is a tad sad.
A decade ago, South Africans would have gone to the island with dread — today, those who don’t go feel left out in the cold.