When Bonnie Greer cheerfully tells me that she is staging a new opera about the television programme Question Time, I become a little lost for words. I am speaking to Greer only a few days after the London Philharmonic Orchestra has suspended four of its musicians who signed a letter, published in The Independent, calling on the BBC to cancel a concert by the Israel Philharmonic. Wherever you stand on musical boycotts, the London Philharmonic’s bizarre claim that ‘for the LPO, music and politics do not mix’ only feeds the overwhelming public perception of classical music as a gilded cage, incapable of anything beyond a slavish devotion to the past. An opera about Question Time suddenly feels like a breath of fresh air.
 Greer of course appeared as a panellist on the BBC programme two years ago, alongside the BNP leader Nick Griffin. The experience was to be life-changing for her. ‘When I was asked to do Question Time, I was a little aware of its significance but since I wasn’t brought up in the United Kingdom I really didn’t know how important this broadcast was to so many people’, Greer tells me, ‘and suddenly this universe opened up to me that I hadn’t actually known was there. I was stopped on the street by people I didn’t know who gave me their opinion about what they wanted to have in the broadcast and how they felt about being British. I was totally unprepared for that kind of emotional outpouring because for me it had always been just another programme.’ Opening newspapers to find herself being discussed and rated was clearly an overwhelming experience for Greer, who did not have the luxury of a politician’s entourage to fall back on. ‘For me, looking back at the broadcast is always about something other than what happened on that day. I just remember all the things I went through in the run-up to it’.
 Watching the audience members expressing themselves was the most moving experience for Greer as she sat through the actual broadcast. ‘It didn’t matter what the politicians were saying. It was as if the audience had to say something about how they saw the United Kingdom, what they thought it was, what problems they thought it had and how they thought these should be solved. As I sat there I had so much time literally on my hands because I didn’t really speak that much. And I guess my playwright’s mind sat there and I thought this is really a piece of art.’
 It was immediately apparent in Greer’s mind that she had an opera on her hands and in January last year she approached Deborah Bull, the Creative Director of the Royal Opera House. ‘I said, look, I would like to do Question Time as an opera — something for the Royal Opera’s experimental wing, the Linbury. I wanted to create a piece of experimental opera that wouldn’t last more than an hour. People who weren’t used to the opera form could come and see it.’ Contrary to various reports in the media, Greer is adamant that she never had any intention of writing something that had Nick Griffin singing in it. ‘I just didn’t want to be a part of anything like that and I didn’t think anybody wanted to hear anything like that.’
 What Greer wanted to capture in an operatic sense was the psychic turmoil that she witnessed in the run-up to the Question Time broadcast. ‘If you know the Hitchcock film Rear Window, then it’s as if I’m looking at these windows and they’re all different people from all kinds of ethnicity and ages, talking about the Britain that they know and how no-one is listening to them and no-one cares about their point of view — it’s really the nation up until that broadcast. The opera’s title, Yes, is about all of us being in a nation on the brink of so much change. We can say yes to being citizens of it instead of fleeing.’ Greer sees herself working in reaction to the passive experience often associated with much of the classical tradition. ‘People can walk out after the opera asking questions as opposed to the kind of experience where you sit back, absorb and enjoy it and clap. This opera should be the beginning of something for people’.
 With Greer’s libretto and music written by the British composer Errollyn Wallen, Yes is the first time that Covent Garden has seen two black women collaborate on a new piece. ‘I’m very aware of the fact that we’re two black women and I don’t think any major house has done this before’, Greer acknowledges, ‘but the door can be opened. We have not been dictated to. This is our point of view, our way of seeing the world. I hope people can see that opera isn’t some fusty, dusty, old piece of work that doesn’t have anything to do with anybody. Once you get involved in opera, it’s the most perfect way of doing art because it just combines everything. It’s a play and yet it’s also music at its most complex. Opera is the work of people coming together at one of the highest levels that you can come together as a creative process’.
 The process by which her playwright’s mind adapts to the operatic tradition fascinates Greer. ‘In the theatre the playwright constructs a play and everything must be built around that. There the composer is still an addition. In opera that is reversed and the music is now first. It’s been a learning curve for me. I have to build within the places that the composer allows you to be in. It’s a great discipline and also teaches you how much music means to humans’, she enthuses. ‘When you work in opera you realize that music is literally another language. It’s become quite addictive for me now to get involved with opera because music is really bigger than words’.
 Given Greer’s obvious enthusiasm for the medium, I’m interested to see whether she agrees that the classical music community has nevertheless slipped into social complacency. ‘I think it has become bourgeois over the years’, she concedes, ‘since a lot of really political opera has been shut down and opera composers have had to prettify what they’re trying to say. These trends get promoted because it is a very expensive art form and it has become a plaything of the wealthy’. But Greer is passionate in her defence of opera in itself. ‘Working class people in Italy go to the opera at night and they take their friends and their kids to sit and listen to Puccini and Verdi. Verdi himself was writing during the Risorgimento and all of his operas were a call for the Italian people to rise up. The people were able to absorb the metaphor of the opera even though the opera itself may seem frivolous.
 ‘There’s a scene in Yes where a man is painting something that he doesn’t understand. Suddenly he stands back and realizes what he’s painting. He’s painting his nation and he’s painting his inner self in relation to that nation. He says now he understands its relevance, that this nation is baking in its own shit and he’s not part of it.’ It is clear that Greer revels in taking aim at the elitist posturing, high camp and other loaded stereotypes unhappily associated with opera today. But it is a very personal compulsion that has been the main driving force behind Greer’s opera. ‘I think that the liberal left has become too comfortable. We have too many professional leftists and people who espouse a certain point of view but actually don’t have a clue about it. Why are there black guys in the English Defence League? It says something to me about how smug the liberal left has become. To write this opera is my march. There’s still room in society for one person to say something.’
It is refreshing to hear someone enthuse about opera as something subversive, defiantly political and still necessary. ‘It’s not a universal statement, it’s a tiny statement’, Greer adds, ‘It’s my snapshot of a moment in time from my camera. You accept or don’t accept the snapshot. But it’s an hour long and you’ll have some good tunes to hum’.Â
