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Scene One of Twelve |
It's wonderfully quick, Vietnamese Water Puppetry. Done and dusted in forty minutes flat. The perfect pre-dinner entertainment.
Henry and I discovered this the other evening. Water puppetry is to Vietnam what Opera is to Italy, and although we've always had our doubts about opera, we thought we ought to take a look. But our hearts sank when we saw the programme. There would be twelve scenes, all of them involving those shiny marionettes. Puppets of children playing in the water, puppets of dragons fighting in the fields, puppets of women growing rice, puppets of a turtle and a phoenix dancing like lovers. Oh boy, we thought. We've got to sit through all this puppetry before we can head off to our Emperor's Banquet at a restaurant down the road (six courses for £6.20.)
So it was quite a relief that each scene seemed to last about three minutes. Once we'd grasped the timings, we found ourselves rather enjoying the colourful skill of the puppeteers, manoeuvring their little charges on long poles beneath the water to the sound of the Vietnamese pipes.
If Verdi had taken the same approach, I'd have taken out Lifetime Membership of Glyndebourne long ago.
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