BECAUSE MY NEAREST and dearest persist in buying me socks for Christmas (what do they think I am? A centipede?), I have treated myself to the gift I really wanted: a visit to 18 Folgate Street, London’s spookiest building. It is one of those old Huguenot weavers’ houses in Spitalfields: shuttered, thin and tall; beautiful but distressed — like Garbo in
Camille. Where it differs from the rest of Spitalfields, however, is that it has not been mod-conned. It has no electricity. Chamber pots (part filled) still litter the bedrooms. By candlelight you stumble on rooms which seem to have been vacated by an 18th-century family moments earlier, leaving meals half-eaten, sewing half-stitched, beds rumpled, washing hanging out, lives suspended in that intangible fourth dimension which we call time.
You smell their presence; you imagine shadows moving behind you in mirrors dimmed by dust; you hear conversations, always one room distant. You sense the family’s rise . . . and its fall. For while the lower floors are crammed with indulgent Georgian furnishings, the top floor is a garret of Dickensian squalor, the air putrid with damp rot and something much worse: death and decay. The early 19th century was terrible for the silk trade, and the family at 18 Folgate Street was clearly plunged into poverty. But it isn’t this that accounts for the spectral mood. It is the fact that the only boy in the family hanged himself in this forlorn, filthy attic.
But did I just write the word “fact”? That attests to the grip which this strange time-capsule exerts on the imagination. The “fact” is that there are no facts here. The family, its furniture, the myriad details of love, death and domesticity, were all the fantasy of a maverick Californian called Dennis Severs. Drawn to London by the mellow melancholy of English twilight, he inevitably arrived in Spitalfields, home since times immemorial to London’s immigrants, misfits and mad (Bedlam was just over the road).
Severs bought 18 Folgate Street when it was a derelict shell in 1979 and lived an extraordinary antique life in it for two decades until his death at Christmas time, three years ago. First he slept in all ten rooms, from cellar to attic, to divine the “aura” of each. Then he set about acquiring paintings, clothes, wigs and innumerable period objects to fill his house. At the same time he invented a family, the Jervises, and their history. But his genius was to leave this elaborate piece of family-as-theatre dangling just short of explicitness, so that any visitor with an ounce of empathy finds himself strangely prompted to weave his own story, or nightmare, while prowling within these mildewed walls.
Severs’s genius lives on. The house, now run by the Spitalfields Trust, exists as he wanted. It still hovers disconcertingly between past and present, illusion and reality, the senses and the soul, life and death. And inevitably it blurs the edges between them. You emerge with a shiver that cannot be entirely explained by the winter wind whipping down Bishopsgate.
How do you enter the late Mr Severs’s world? Well, you could try a seance. More reliable, however — if less atmospheric — is a website: www.dennissevershouse.co.uk. Even 18th-century man needs the internet, it seems.
ARIAS OF ANGUISH in the opera world! More than usual, I mean. Ticket sales are falling, grants frozen, and billionaire sponsors — hit by the falling stock market, poor lambs — wriggling out of promises made in rosier times.
So how do opera companies cope? By reverting to national stereotype, it seems. The British, who have never really seen the point of opera, simply dump shows. According to a leaked Scottish Arts Council report, Scottish Opera, which has had more crises than Pavarotti has had pies, is cutting so much that it will be performing just 39 times a year. If its subsidy stays constant, this means it will spend £192,000 of taxpayers’ money each time it goes on stage.
Hmm.
Troubled American companies, by contrast, revert to the old showbiz adage that nobody ever went bust by underestimating public taste. Thus the hilariously self-important Chicago Lyric Opera has dumped Berlioz’s 1836 epic Benvenuto Cellini in favour of — wait for it — Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, a work that even amateurs consider somewhat unchallenging. How are the pompous fallen! But by making that change, Chicago saves $1 million.
Houston Grand Opera’s swap is even more bizarre. Out goes a harrowing modern opera, Dead Man Walking, which ends with a state execution. In comes a frothy Viennese operetta, The Merry Widow. Still, I suppose there’s a macabre thread of logic connecting the two titles.
No one can rival Italy’s opera companies, however, for devising imaginative escapes from financial debacles. (They have had 400 years of practice, of course.) Last week saw great frolics at Naples’s opera house, where a £7 million deficit is considered no impediment to la dolce vita. To bring in some cash, it agreed to let a lingerie company distribute a catalogue, full of heart-stoppingly under-dressed young ladies, to the Italian President and the rest of the glittering audience arriving for Don Giovanni. For this unusual promotional opportunity, the bra-and-knickers merchants agreed to pay £50,000.
Alas, killjoys intervened. Although the opera house’s boss defended the catalogue with the ingenious argument that it fitted “Mozart’s inclination towards dramma giocoso”, the Mayor of Naples decided it “infringed good taste” and banned it. This silly censorship annoyed even right-wingers. “Lingerie is a part of women’s lives,” said Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s grand-daughter. “The mayor is exaggerating.”
Maybe. But not half as exaggerating as some of the underwear sported by the feisty lasses in the catalogue. (I had to peep, in the interests of journalistic research.) Perhaps troubled Scottish Opera should do a similar deal with a manufacturer who will reveal what lovely young Scots are wearing beneath the tartan these days.
