Television - Andrew Billen thinks television should be brave and show more opera

I once asked the co-creator of NYPD Blue, Steven Bochco, why his series Cop Rock lasted only six episodes. "Embarrassment," he replied. "People found it too damn embarrassing to watch." The problem was that four times in each programme his policemen would break into song.

I am sure he was right, yet there is nothing intrinsically impossible about having characters singing, even in so apparently naturalistic a medium as television. After all, in real life car chases aren't orchestrated, yet we accept the convention of incidental music. In the heyday of the Hollywood musical, Judy Garland would break into song on trams. Singing worked for Dennis Potter in Pennies from Heaven. Sometimes, television is so histrionic that it seems to strain towards the condition of music, as the authors of Jerry Springer: the opera noticed. And the soaps are not called operas for nothing.

Why, then, has television become so phobic about opera? One reason, I think, is that for a long time it did what it had long ceased to attempt to do with non-lyric theatre: it simply pointed the camera at the stage, which is the most boring approach of all. The answer is not to televise opera, but to make opera into television - and this is exactly what Channel 4 did by commissioning Penny Woolcock to remake John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer (Sunday 25 May). Woolcock duly filmed this controversial 1991 opera, about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1985, as if it were one of her regular docudramas, which is to say with only slightly heightened visual realism.

Potentially, this was going to make the artificiality of the sound all the more obvious. Because of the long choral introduction, it was 19 minutes before anyone actually burst into song, and, I have to admit, I was dreading it. Yet within a few minutes it seemed the most natural thing in the world for a bunch of middle-aged American tourists to be singing about their visit to the Pyramids and their hip operations. The singing was neither absurd nor pretentious, but it alerted the hearer that the chatter took place against the background of history.

Klinghoffer is one of those pieces that believe of causes, and the causes of causes, there is no end. Its opening words come from its Chorus of Exiled Palestinians: "My father's house was razed/In 1948/ When the Israelis passed/Over our street." The Chorus of Exiled Jews then comes on and sings us back to the Holocaust. The second act, prefaced by a to-camera piece on what looks like Channel 4 News, retold the story of Ishmael, outcast son of Abraham, ancestor of the Arabs and half-brother of Isaac. The history of the Middle East was a family quarrel.

The central question the piece asked was whether, if the past explains, it can ever excuse. Klinghoffer is a middle-aged Amer- ican Jew who is not only totally for a quiet life, but is condemned to it since he is confined to a wheelchair. By accident, because he cannot follow the other hostages up to the top deck, he is left alone with the most psychotic of the hijackers, Rambo, played by the baritone Leigh Melrose. With him, Klinghoffer (Sandford Sylvan) finds his voice. Baritone is soon abusing baritone. Woolcock has Rambo spin him around during his aria, but Klinghoffer carries on singing. Nothing can stop him. A long posthumous aria accompanies his descent beneath the waves, his forehead punctured by a bullet hole.

His murder is an act of terrible cruelty against the most helpless of the passengers, yet, because the crime has been committed out of sight, the terrorists are not hated by their captives. A showgirl boasts at a giggly quayside press conference of being favoured with cigarettes from them. The world praises their restraint. As the hijackers are led away to captivity, the captain hugs their leader. "And you embraced him," cries Klinghoffer's widow, the fabulous mezzo-soprano Yvonne Howard.

The opera has been criticised for reporting rather than dramatising the story, having been modelled on the structure of a Bach Passion, "narrative poems supported by large choral pillars". But Woolcock's use of news footage (it shows both Nazi storm troopers emptying Jewish ghettos and the slaughter at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps) and her introduction of sub-plots and back-stories for the characters made up the deficiency.

Given that we know basically what happens and that everything has to happen at the pace of opera, the film generated amazing tension - and pathos too, especially at tiny moments such as when the boat's dancing girls help the cancer-ridden Mrs Klinghoffer out of her old dress and into another so she can face the world with bravery.

Where the production failed is where most operas sung in English fail: you could not hear enough words. Woolcock used subtitles for the choruses but not the arias, and she should have used them all the time. The captain's dark night of the soul - he is a kind of Captain Vere figure from Billy Budd - for me remained covered in darkness. But the final effect was of a hugely moving drama, like all the best art, bafflingly odd and strictly apposite at the same time. Embarrassing it was not.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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