Something more Exotic

Camels on the Silk Road,
experienced by RODERIC DUNNETT

Music-accompanied stagings yield some strange surprises. The celebrated opera producer Ellen Kent thinks nothing of punctuating her Moldovan Opera productions of Verdi -- Rigoletto, and so on -- with hunting dogs straining at the leash, or even a prancing horse.

Monkeys, lapdogs, snarling cats, even the imitation geese or ducks and more than lifesize equines that people the National Theatre's Great War saga Warhorse, these are common enough zoological, stage phenomena. But two huge, live, full-size Bactrian camels male and female, humps and fur and all, shambling onstage?..

COVENT GARDEN

LONDON

UNITED KINGDOM

CHINA