Popcorns, tapas and a night at the opera

Amateur operatic and dramatic societies had a common complaint when I worked on my first local paper.

After all the time and effort devoted by volunteers to each show, coverage of the first night would be entrusted to some bored junior reporter with little or no appreciation of culture, a pressing desire to be somewhere else and a consequent temptation to rattle off a stinker of a review.

They had a point. So when I became chief reporter of the paper's district office, I took care to send a colleague who, as an active and gifted member of such a society herself, would be writing from a position of authority.

When she too delivered an unenthusiastic write-up, the society cried foul still louder. "It was obvious she'd have a go at us," they said, "what with her belonging to a rival society."

For the opening night of a short run for Carmen at the 1,200-seater theatre in Abu Dhabi's glittering Emirates Palace hotel, Salut! Salam reverted to route one. Cub reporter days are long gone, but my reflections are still those of a know-nothing dilettante.

All week, I had been warned that tickets were scarce. Mine cost about £50, for which I got a large, comfortable seat with plenty of legroom. It was also surrounded by a lot of empty seats; someone mentioned a local custom of well-to-do and well-meaning people buying tickets to support the principle of live arts, but not bothering to turn up.

What did they miss?


Well, popcorn for a start. I do not go to opera enough to know whether this is now normal practice, but it did surprise me (and apologies for the poor quality of the photo).

Opera, light or otherwise, may not be my strongest point, but Carmen I like. This interpretation, billed as the work of an "International European Touring Cast", was something of a curate's egg.

Act one seemed a little flat, but it all became much more compelling in acts two and three. The sets were magnificent, the English subtitles for Bizet's French impenetrable (as was some of the delivered French; I heard someone say afterwards that she thought at first they must be singing in Bulgarian).


While the finale was also something of a letdown, my impression - and that of my two companions - was that the cast would probably improve steadily as the run progressed, so that the the third or fourth night could be a better time to attend. I did not see the slips of paper bearing news that an understudy had taken Carmen's role in place of the Russian mezzo soprano Galia Ibragimova.

But my view is no more than that: one man's view, although paying all that money to attend enables me to offer a verdict - "passable performance, could do better" - from high moral ground. I do not suppose that anyone reading this was also present, but if that thought betrays undue pessimism about the size of my Abu Dhabi readership, alternative views would be welcome.

Where I will offer unqualified praise is in the matter of post-concert refreshment. It was past midnight, but one of the bars in this seven-star hotel was able to rustle up a grand selection of tapas - assorted olives, dips, grilled prawns and red peppers stuffed with cheese - for about £12 a head, drinks included.

That experience of stunning value for money, in the sort of location where you might expect to be fleeced, was not my first. In the Fish Market, a superb restaurant in my own temporary home (the Intercontinental hotel) the other evening, I had been preparing myself mentally for a true douloureuse of a bill, one to drive you into the arms of a re-mortgaging broker.

Each dish is chosen from an array of fresh seafood in which prices are given by weight, so that you have little idea until the end of the meal what you have spent.

We had generous appetisers (a succulent local fish, hammour, fried in breadcrumbs), delicious starters of tiger prawns and a small Omani lobster known as cigali, followed by sea bream and more lobster as main courses.

In London, that would have set us back well over £100 for two even without recourse to a wine list guaranteed to be bursting with pretension and ferocious mark ups. Braced for the worst, I asked to sign; £70 for everything. What would you get for that in the West End?