The booing and the boorish

I was in Milan this month for La Prima, the official opening of the opera season at La Scala and a rare moment of cultural significance with which comparisons are few. Does any other city in the world come to a standstill for a concert? Let alone an opera? It would be crackers to think we might close down central London for the performance of a 200-year-old piece of music. Or that such an event might provoke sufficient media interest that political demonstrations are routinely mounted right outside the venue.

In Milan, they stop for Verdi.

To be a guest at La Prima is an extraordinary privilege, an opportunity to dress up in one’s finest and observe the Milanese in full sartorial display. It also makes one witness to a host of arcane rituals and traditions as familiar to its patrons as the ordering of interval champagne.

For one night only, I sat amid the 18th-century splendour to watch a modern adaptation of Verdi’s Macbeth. It was perfectly operatic, in that it lasted a buttock-numbing eternity and I sat twisted in a seat faced in the opposite direction from the stage.

But the most surprising feature was not the decision to cast a massive witches’ chorus, but what happened when the curtain finally came down. Instead of marking the new season with the rapturous applause I was expecting, the audience rose from its gilded seating to unleash an orchestra of boos.

Booing felt cathartic: how refreshing to dispense with po-faced appreciation and embrace one’s inner hooligan instead

Booing is apparently quite common at La Scala. Those most sophisticated theatregoers are seemingly a bunch of louts. The tradition comes courtesy of the “hissing hooligans” or loggionisti who sit up in the balconies, a small but highly voluble group of traditionalists who make their opinions known from high in the gods. From what I could discern during the spluttering 12-minute ovation (another measure of a show’s success), the beef was largely with the show’s director, who cowered in the wings. They quite liked the main performers, but the staging was a fail.

One would have thought the loggionisti would have been more charitable towards the production, given the cultural deprivation they’ve endured in recent months: La Scala has endured a faltering schedule for nearly two years now — and this Macbeth was a first full house.

If anything, the circumstances made them bolder and more confident with their disdain. Maybe it was not the revival of the singing they had missed so much as the chance to make a rumpus once again. As an atmosphere, it felt anarchic — who knew opera could be so punk? And though cruel, it felt cathartic: how refreshing to dispense with normal niceties and po-faced appreciation and embrace one’s inner hooligan instead.

The first records of public booing date back to the ancient capitals, and this powerful act of mob-speak still commands the opera house and football terraces today. Perhaps now more so than ever, as we’ve been allowed to congregate again. Football managers and players are being roared out of employment, reputations savaged by booing fans. Lewis Hamilton was booed during the Formula One season for not being Max Verstappen, the young Dutch racer who claimed the eventual win.

Meanwhile, audiences in Covent Garden have booed the second cast of Tosca for being slightly flat. And Ansel Elgort is being booed in West Side Story, although that’s more to do with past sexual misconduct allegations against the actor — which he denies — than his performance in the leading role.

Booing is very arbitrary. “Souls are boring. Boo, souls,” joked Cousin Greg in a Succession finale twist that unleashed a bloodbath of Machiavellian corporate throes. Such a flippant gesture, and yet it masked his deadly serious goals.

In a landscape with all the nuance of a panto, it’s no wonder we’ve become so crude. Booing may be a gesture of defiance, but it only really serves to get the rancour out. There’s not much we can do about our situations so we’re simply being boorish about it instead.

Boo the plague of cancelled Christmas parties and new restrictions. Boo to Omicron, the viral varmint, and boo to Boris Johnson and all his stupid lies. While we’re at it, I’m sitting on the sofa booing all the crappy festive films. Boo Richard Curtis and Love Actually, which manages to be sexist, fattist and ageist, sometimes all at the same time. Boo The Holiday, with Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz, and the enduring romcom trope in which women are drawn to cringe-inducingly unfunny men. Boo also to the new Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That, which wins a special prize. Its producers have seemingly managed the unmanageable — a comedy that completely dispenses with any laughs.

Admittedly, it might be childish. But a bit like primal screaming or pulverising cushions, booing is pointless but really rather fun. Hence, this Christmas, I’ll be taking tips from the loggionisti to put me in a festive frame of mind.

Jo Ellison is the editor of the FT’s How To Spend It

Follow Jo on Twitter @jellison and email her at [email protected]