Seeing the Future: 24 Hours in Saudi Arabia

At 9pm last Tuesday I received a call from the Ministry of Culture in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Following the invitation sent to me just days earlier (and landing squarely in my SPAM), his?Highness Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saud requests the honour of my company at the premier of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s first Grand Opera, Zarqa Al Yamama.

Thirty hours later, I stepped out in my hastily purchased full-length, long-sleeve black dress and headscarf for an extraordinary 24 hours.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68903890

I freely admit that before I arrived, I had very little understanding of the context or momentous scale of what I was to witness. Settling in to the 13.5 hour flight, I did some reading.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) enjoyed a relatively open and healthy artistic sector from its foundation in 1932 up until the revolution in Iran in 1979 which inspired an insurgency in KSA. ?There was a sharp shift in policy. Cinemas closed and music was banned – the conservative Saudi Arabia of our recent memory was established. Music, under the severe Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam put music in a legal grey-area at best.

I read an article about a concert as recently as 2017. Armed security turned away any non-ticket-holding members of the public and women were banned from attending.

In 2020, the Theatre and Performing Arts Commission was founded, one of eleven commissions established by the Ministry of Culture.

The commission and it’s ten siblings, are an expression of KSA’s economic diversity strategy, setting the stage (as it were) for a post-oil era in the Middle East. The cultural economy is deemed an essential element for the Kingdom’s economic future. Opera and classical music are central to the strategy and two opera houses are under construction.

Don’t think they won’t happen. Zarqa opened on Thursday. The previous Monday, the entire forecourt of the venue (2 soccer fields in size?) was a gravel pit. With daytime temperatures in the high 30s, an army of workers laboured through the night to present an extraordinary, artistically lit and elegant entrance way to an architecturally stunning interior.

The production was epic. A star-studded cast, a sumptuous staging and an intelligent, sensitive and accomplished score by Australian Lee Bradshaw.

I feel that Lee Bradshaw has written a masterpiece, which I am convinced will be greatly praised internationally – Dame Sarah Connolly CBE, in the title role.

The most extraordinary thing, however, was just being there.

Yes, because it was all a little surreal, - “This is the Princess, she runs the place.” “Pleasure to meet you Your Highness. I attempt to run a household with two small boys.” - but also, because I was a western, un-married woman, travelling alone, dressed respectfully but without a head covering and without a chaperone. In 2017, just a handful of years ago I would have been banned from the venue on the basis of my gender and imprisoned for public indecency on the basis of my bared head.

Today, Omar, my Uber drive, carefully types into Google Translate and then presses the ‘play’ button. Google’s voice reads out, “We are so happy to welcome you here to my home, Saudi Arabia. I hope you will love our food, our cult and the opera.” While skewed slightly in translation, the sentiment was overwhelmingly sincere.

Music doesn’t need a Google Translation. As the premiere concluded and the audience gave a standing ovation accompanied by whoops from the balcony where the local cast members friends and family expressed their admiration, beside me, an Arab gentleman is in floods of tears. “I’ve been to the Met and to the Royal Opera, to Paris and Madrid, but the sound of my own language, sung here, has undone me. Tonight is hope.”?