Bravo Figaro: A Life through music

Bravo Figaro with Mark Thomas
Q Theatre
Auckland Arts Festival
Until March 22

It’s a brave man even if he is a comedian, to talk about his father when he regards him as a slavish Thatcherite, a bigot and an abuser. Comedian Mark Thomas admires and despises his father in equal measure and has built his show Bravo Figaro around his ambivalent attitudes. The show is a history of his father, the story of his own escape from his working class background and his strained relationship with his father.

The stage is dominated by a screen projecting an image of his father who looks a bit like his son's description – Moses with a hangover. On stage there are  a number of cardboard boxes that look as though they contain the memories of his father along with a huge pile of old LPs and a child’s ark handbuilt by his father.

His father was a self-made man with little education who became a well-established builder and craftsman. He was a communist who admired Thatcher and desired a better future for his children but he was a bully and he physically abused both his children and his wife.

He also sought as did many working class to improve himself. To this end he pursued an interest in music with a particular love of opera. He attended opera performance at various opera houses in the UK and regularly bought two recordings of any opera he attended – one to play at home and one to play on his cassette recorder on the building site.

Thomas’s memories of his father and life in the home are measured out in various recordings and arias – his father would sing all the great arias, making up his own pigeon Italian, German or French.

While most of the show is Thomas’s rambling collection of stories and anecdotes, these are interspersed with snippets of a recording he made of his father shortly before he died, talking about the old man’s love of opera. There are also a few asides made by his brother who speaks from the ark.

His father comes across as a right-wing socialist Alf Garnett – someone who “would go to Smith and Caughy’s to get a tattoo.”

His opera tastes developed over the years and, while loving Verdi and Rossini, his favourite composer was the contemporary American John Adams and his favourite opera was political thriller The “Death of Klinghoffer.”

He paints a man with a strange passion for the art form which has affected the whole family. Even though Thomas is not an opera follower, he manages to convince various people to have a group of Royal Opera House singers go to Bournemouth to perform in his dying father’s living room.

Along the way we get the adventures of Thomas as he takes off to London to drama school and his entry into the alternative comedy scene in the 1980’s where he embarked on the sort of comedy that was directed at bigots like his father.

He subsequently had shows in various places around the world even the UK House of Lords and his current show was developed since his father’s death.

His comments and observations about opera seem to be his own but they may well derive unconsciously from his father. At one point he realised that he was singing a Figaro aria on his child’s toes, an alternative to “This Little Piggy” which his father must have done to him as a child.

Then there are wry observations such as “If you haven’t had a doze, it’s not really opera”

And “Mozart’s like salmon it’s hard to F___ up.”

What one gets from the show is the transformative power of opera and the way in which his father coming to opera was where “he found his inner camp.”

The mixture of eulogy, condemnation and comedy had the audience on a roller coaster ride between crying and laughing, appalled at the comedian’s criticism of his father and reflecting on their own relationship with parents and children.