Buzzard gets the bird at Covent Garden
Last night’s performance of Mozart’s Mitridate at the Royal Opera House went ahead minus one of its stars: a buzzard named Jesse. The bird was hurriedly written out of the production after stopping the show with first-night nerves during the revival of the opera on Friday night.
The problem occurred early in the first act, with Ann Murray and Luba Orgonasova in mid-aria. As their singing grew in volume, Jesse became increasingly agitated, tugging at its leg chain in a futile bid to exit stage left. Then the bird slumped forward. The audience clearly suspected that the buzzard was a ex-buzzard, a former buzzard, in short that the buzzard was dead, deceased, bereft of life. There were boos and cries of “shame” and “get that bird off the stage”. Eventually a handler, happily in costume, appeared on stage and extricated his charge to ecstatic applause.
Both the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the RSPCA received complaints, and Covent Garden faces a potentially embarrassing investigation. The bird was perilously close to a flame-torch, and the opera house could be prosecuted under an act of 1911 for “cruelly terrifying an animal”. Whether the singing would form part of the case is a moot point.
Precedent advises against the use of animals on stage: the opening night of the musical Gone with the Wind at Drury Lane was wrecked by horses defecating all over the stage during the burning of Atlanta, and the RSPCA once closed a play at the Half Moon alleging mistreatment of a goldfish. But directors persist and the Royal Shakespeare Company currently has two productions on at the Barbican that use animals: The Two Gentlemen of Verona with a dog (scripted by Shakespeare) and All’s Well That Ends Well with two falcons (boldly added by Sir Peter Hall). Quite what the Royal Opera House will do after getting the bird over Mitridate is hard to gauge, but don’t expect elephants in the next Aida.
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