Santa Diana

Eva Peron: still centre stage

I blame the media myself.  But when the late Princess of Wales died, I was given the distinct impression that the weird week that followed was a new phenomenon.  All those people laying flowers at Kensington Palace, and then shrieking as the hearse rolled past: a nation in a state of collapse, and rather embarrassed about it afterwards.

Half an hour at the Evita Museum in Buenos Aires provided evidence aplenty that it wasn't a new phenomenon at all.  They play you a video of her funeral, you see, all grainy in early 1950s black and white, and quite a sight.  Hordes of people lining the streets in dazzling sunshine.  The coffin, draped in a vast flag.  Photographs of a beaming Eva Peron tied to the railings, "Santa Evita!" scrawled across the top.  The flowers -- the flowers! -- piled up high and wide at the gates of a Cathedral.  And in the flickering eyes of the Argentine crowds, that muddle of genuine sorrow and I'm-rather-enjoying-this that London generated that sunny September Funeral Day back in 1997.

It must be because Eva was our dress rehearsal for Diana.  Both women were a national treasure and a lucrative international export.  Both were young, both became beautiful and (to quote the lyrics of Tim Rice) both were dressed up to the nines, at sixes and sevens.   Evita hit the West End about twenty five years after its subject's death.  Keep an eye out for a new musical -- Queen of  Hearts, perhaps? -- in about ten years' time.

John