'Ingerland', by Jocelyn Pook - the ‘beautiful game’ to get Royal treatment at Opera House

Published: 21 May 2010
by PETER GRUNER

A THEATRE composer from Highbury has written a new opera featuring football supporters and WAGs – players’ wives and girlfriends – which will be performed at the Royal Opera House, writes Peter Gruner.

Ingerland, by Jocelyn Pook, who lives near Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, will explore themes of what it means to be a football fan.

Ms Pook recorded matches and interviewed supporters, talking about their passion for the game, while researching the opera.

It is part of this year’s summer season at the opera house in Covent Garden, which will feature Opera Shots, a triple bill of short, modern operas from three composers experimenting with the genre for the first time.

Officials at the Royal Opera House hope the contemporary themes in the new works, which will be 30 minutes long and sung in English, will “shake things up” and make the traditionally elitist world of opera more accessible. 

Ms Pook said she is fascinated by football and the place it holds in society.

“Living near Arsenal’s stadium I often hear the distant roar of a mass of voices on the wind. Thousands of people sing their hearts out in unison with a fervour and commitment rarely heard outside a concert hall.”

She created the piece using fragments of chants, cheers, boos, and rants.

“It was also an opportunity to explore ideas around the drama of the game, and around ritual, trance, worship, tribalism and identity, as 

well as heightened emotions”, she said. The opera will also include the fictional storylines of WAGs with a penchant for cosmetic surgery, who worry about their weight and their partners’ infidelity.

Video footage of the interviews with supporters will be shown during the performance.

Ms Pook added: “Being a team supporter has become an increasingly important theme in our culture and there is such an array of emotions during a game, which I thought would lend well to the theatricality of an opera.

“The WAGs’ obsession with body perfection and their fashion for scalpel intervention is so prevalent that I couldn’t help it creeping into the music and lyrics.”

John Lloyd Davies, the head of opera development at the Royal Opera House, said that he hoped that with Opera Shots “[Covent Garden] get something theatrically that shakes things up and breaks down barriers, opening the minds of our traditional audience and opening opera up to a new audience.”