Toby the Tenor

Part 1

For anyone who, like me, has spent long periods in Paris, last night’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games was not a surprise. 

I’ve been reading accounts and comments this morning from journalists and public here in Britain who found it bewildering. The faceless ghost character who ran across the roof tops with the torch; the horse galloping down the Seine towards the Eiffel Tower: the dancing blue Dionysus complete with yellow beard and chest hair lacked raison d’être for the logical British. 

If you spend any time in Paris, or France for that matter, you will hear one phrase as often as any other and possibly more often. That phrase is “pourquoi pas?” It’s an important utterance, embodying the whimsy that liberates the French to create art, luxuries and delicacies of life-enhancing complexity. 

The Eiffel Tower is a good example of French “pourquoi pas”. It doesn’t contain anything, symbolise anything specific, it doesn’t commemorate anyone, it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a thing in itself. Is its value to be found in the view it offers from the platforms? No, it is valued for elegantly embodying our creative ambition. 

I really loved the Paris opening ceremony. It was more revealing of France than even the French will know. The madcap camp, the inclusivity, the freedom within its imagination, the modesty, the toughness of those dancers kicking the Can-can in the pouring rain, the entitlement to being sexy. The imagery was about the way the French view themselves which is far more interesting than how we view the French. 

Imagine if the direction of the ceremony were left to a Hollywood director. We’d get Emily In Paris complete with striped t-shirts, berets, baguettes and moustaches. We’d carry on with our outsider’s view of the French and their chance to reveal themselves to us would be lost. 

The day after the London Olympics opened in 2012, a German friend who lives in New York contacted me to say “What the hey was that dreadful opening ceremony about? It was soooo bad.” I was knocked back because I’d also loved Danny Boyle’s take on British history, culture and character. I didn’t say anything but thought about my friend’s reaction. 

The gap between what we know of ourselves and what the rest of the world knows about us can is part of nationhood and it goes both ways. We indulge in the history and detail of our own culture and block out that of others because we haven’t time to take everything in, we don’t speak the language, we don’t go there often enough to justify the time investment and, especially in the case of isolated Britain, it’s over there and not here. 

There’s a linguistic false-friend between English and French. Prétentieu does not mean the same as pretentious. It has the quality of aspiring to something in French, like a “pretender” to the throne. In fact, there isn’t an equivalent French word that accurately translates the meaning of pretentious. 

If you’ve ever witnessed a French person tasting and admiring wine, it’s a birthright for them to be able to articulate the experience in proud lyrical terms that jars with Anglo-Saxon reserve. 

That was what I saw last night on the Seine. An unguarded, proud declaration of “this is me” and the uninitiated among us were surprised to see it. 

It’s fair to say that Paris is probably the capital of opera right now. They have four opera houses and several other venues where opera is occasionally presented. Unlike Anglo-Saxons, the French have always embraced opera for its strangeness. They have a history of getting involved with the live experience and often boo a performance if they don’t like some aspect of it or it doesn’t pass the “pourquoi pas” test. 

Parisian audiences are open to being presented with imagery they don’t quite understand and the Olympic ceremony was a classic example of something passing the “pourquoi pas” test because it was beautiful or resonated with gallic sensibility even if it didn’t fulfil a narrative arc. 

A rambling post today, for which I make no apology because I wonder if part of this comes down to the difference in the arts funding models between Britain and France.