Ikea Opera brings harmony to the flatpack shopping experience

No floaty dresses, no Così fan tutte, no landed gentry, no wicker picnic hampers, although it has to be said that the store’s PR lady, noticing that I was a frazzled by the journey, gave me a voucher for a free Swedish meatball dinner! I’m having it framed.

Not that the opera was PR for Ikea; it was more black propaganda, entirely independent of the corporate behemoth and its 565 million customers worldwide. Where better to bring high culture to the punters?

Around 50 opera fans — some from as far as Macclesfield and Manchester — were waiting at the Ikea escalator, and were handed programmes that looked like furniture assembly instructions. A soprano in a yellow uniform came in, yodelling tender entreaties to customers through a megaphone, and led us to the first scene in a living room, where musicans played mobile piano, viola, cello and accordion, and a diva huffily read the kitchens catalogue. Two regular Continued from page 1 customers walked uncaring into the middle of the scene to measure a television stand.

Much of the libretto was written in Ikean, an international language rather like Klingon or Esperanto. Many arias made repetitive use of a product name or a corporate slogan, such as “Be brave not beige” and “Do you live in a house or a home?” Afterwards, I said to Rebecca Lea, the director, that I couldn’t quite make out the word sung in the kitchen percussion scene. “Gorm,” she answered. “You can do a lot with Gorm.” I think Gorm is a modular storage unit.

The pièce de r?sistance in both senses was the Library Scene, in which an innocent young man tries to build a flatpack in the literary surroundings of half a dozen Billy bookcases. (This looked uncannily like my own study at home, which has seven Billys.) For ten minutes, the man sang the word Billy over and over. At first, there was heady anticipation in his voice as he ripped open the flatpack, followed by a tremor as he searched for the Allen key. Then harmony fell into dissonance, the bookcase collapsed and Billy became a word for existential agony. Fortunately the pianist helped the singer to fix the bookcase, and it all ended in a Wagnerian crescendo of victory.

Flatpack was composed by Tom Lane, an Englishman now studying in Berlin. Lea characterised the work as “contemporary . . . German . . . avant garde?” It was free, and had certainly drawn a younger audience than the sixtysomethings of Covent Garden. “If it’s rubbish we’ll just go shopping,” said four women on a girls’ night out. But, by the end, the applause was rapturous, even from those customers with trolleys who had stormed through scenes, only to come back and ogle.

“The acoustics are a bit of a challenge,” said Lea, who called Ikea 14 times before they agreed to the performances. “Last week someone was Hoovering in the background, and I was annoyed at first, until I realised: that’s an F-sharp.”

I felt as audiences did in the Soviet era, when a critical allegory was played out on stage under the eyes of the censors. Did Ikea quite know what was going on under its roof in this domestic disharmony, this critique of crass commercialism?

“Our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people,” it says rather Swedishly in the Ikea manifesto. Years ago, Ikea did bring us a revolution in cheap, good design, but now the screws are loose. Joe Kerr, head of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, said: “If Ikea represents a design revolution, then it’s going through its Stalinist phase right now, dictating taste to people.”

Kerr was disappointed to have missed the opera, but he has shopped in Ikea. “The furniture there is like Islamic art — you can’t make anything perfect, there must be a deliberate flaw in it — and with Ikea there’s always a hole in the wrong place or a missing screw.”

That said, we conform because everything is so colourful. We don’t spot Ikea crushing our individuality because prices are so low, you can’t say no. More British people go to Ikea on Sunday than go to church. And we can only hope that more of those people will see Flatpack, which is hoping for funding for a British and European tour. In the meantime, you can get a flavour on YouTube. Be brave, not beige.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

stations and supermarkets than actual banks.

Their story has no clear narrative arc, no real rhyme or reason. Between 1932 and 1934 they simply took one long road trip through the Midwest, robbing things when they ran out of money and killing anyone who tried to stop them; Clyde and his partners murdered about a dozen innocent lawmen. Even their peers looked down on them, and their fame was largely limited to Texas and neighbouring states; the only time Bonnie and Clyde made the front page of The New York Times was the day after their deaths. The scene in the movie that hews closest to history is the last. Bonnie and Clyde really were cut to pieces by a hail of bullets on a dirt road in rural Louisiana.

Worse, at least in terms of historical accuracy, was the 1970 movie Bloody Mama, starring Shelley Winters as the criminal mastermind of another infamous Depression-era group, the Barker gang. In the film Winters portrays the submachineguntoting Kate “Ma” Barker, who, legend and the FBI has it, led her sons and their hillbilly pals in a string of bank robberies and kidnappings. Yet research for Public Enemies proved that Barker did nothing of the sort. She never carried a gun, had her face on a wanted poster or walked into a bank to do anything other than make a deposit. “That old woman,” one of the gang said decades later, “couldn’t even plan breakfast.”

The myth of Ma Barker, however, owes less to Hollywood invention than J. Edgar Hoover’s desperation. In reality, it was Barker’s son Fred and his partner Alvin Karpis who ran the gang. Ma Barker travelled with them from time to time, happily living off their ill-gotten gains, but she spent most of her time sitting by the radio doing jigsaw puzzles. The seeds of her legend were planted on the day that the FBI cornered Fred in a Florida lakehouse in January 1935. Once the smoke cleared from the resulting gunfight, FBI agents found that they had killed Fred Barker, as planned, but were startled to find that they had also killed his 62-year-old mother. Rather than explain this to the press, Hoover told reporters that Ma had been the brains of the outfit. Only with the opening of case files decades later can we see that the FBI did not gather a single fact to suggest that Ma Barker was anything but a dimwitted grandmother.

Dillinger presents special challenges for the historian and, in particular, the film-maker. He never intended to become a criminal. He never intended to be much of anything. He was the son of an abusive Indianapolis grocer, and a terrible student given to petty crimes; after high school tried the Navy, which he didn’t take to, and marriage, which didn’t work either. He was loafing in his neighborhood pool hall in the early 1920s when a local troublemaker enticed him into the drunken mugging of a grocer. A judge threw the book at Dillinger, giving him what became nine hard years, most of it in the Indiana State Penitentiary.

In prison he fell in with a hardened group of bank robbers whose friendship, one suspects, warmed once it became apparent that Dillinger would be given parole first. At that point his pals taught him how to rob a bank, gave him a list of promising targets and then made him promise to use his illegal proceeds to free them. That is exactly what Dillinger did, smuggling in a set of pistols the group used to break out of prison in September 1933. “There’s no denying I did it,” Dillinger told reporters after his subsequent crime spree and arrest. “Why not? I stick to my friends and they stick to me.”

That impromptu press conference in January 1934 introduced Dillinger to millions of Americans. His fame can be attributed in large part to his being one of the few “public enemies” to be captured and interviewed during his career; almost all the others were seen only as rigor mortis set in.

His performance in front of those reporters was breathtaking. He smiled and joked, leant his elbow on a prosecutor’s shoulder and admitted everything. As one scribe put it the next day, Dillinger “rates in the eyes of calloused observers as the most amazing specimen of his kind ever seen outside of a wildly imaginative moving picture”.

Dillinger has been portrayed by diverse actors in several movies, though by far the best-remembered is Warren Oates in the title role of Dillinger, directed by John Milius in 1973. The movie’s storyline bears little resemblance to history, and Oates, while a fine actor, is far too rugged a performer for Dillinger. The real Dillinger was a lover, not a fighter, absolutely smitten by his girlfriend Billie Frechette, and his politeness toward those he robbed was legendary.

Even worse was the movie’s portrayal of the lead FBI agent, Melvin Purvis, played by the hulking actor Ben Johnson. In the film Johnson is the walking personification of the taciturn western sheriff, a big man of few words who takes out gangsters by the score with nothing in his hands but a gun and a cigar. The real Purvis was a small, squeaky-voiced 29-year-old whose ineptitude was one of the main reasons that Dillinger was able to remain at large for so long. Little of this was Purvis’s fault. He was earnest, good-hearted and hardworking. But the FBI was very much in its infancy at the time. Until the gunfights of 1933 its agents were not allowed to carry firearms and, legally, could not make arrests. Purvis was simply never trained to the things he was called upon to do in the pursuit of Dillinger. Though the press never caught wind of it, Purvis was ultimately replaced. He later resigned from the FBI and killed himself in 1960. About the only thing that the 1973 Dillinger got right was in the young Richard Dreyfuss’s portrayal of the cackling psychopath Baby Face Nelson, Dillinger’s sidekick.

The Dillinger and Purvis you will see in Public Enemies are far closer to history than just about any cinematic gangster of recent issue. Yes, there is a degree of fictionalisation, but that’s Hollywood; if the film was 100 per cent accurate you’d call it a documentary. Mann, a stickler for historical accuracy, managed to shoot at the actual scenes of Dillinger’s most famous jailbreak; the site of his most famous gunight, at the Little Bohemia lodge in Wisconsin; and the site of his death, shot by the FBI outside the Biograph Theatre on Chicago’s North Side. For the Biograph scenes, Mann prevailed on the city of Chicago to hand over six blocks of North Lincoln Avenue, which were transformed into an exact replica of that steamy evening when Dillinger met his fate 75 years ago, in July 1934.

I was an extra in these scenes, portraying one of the first reporters to rush toward Dillinger’s fallen body. As someone who spent almost five years researching his story, it was an eerie experience. Everything was as it had been that night. Depp was dressed exactly like Dillinger; it is said that he was even wearing some of Dillinger’s clothing. Once he fell, to the same stretch of pavement where Dillinger died, I rushed past Christian Bale, as Purvis, towards him. This scene was shot over and over, and every last detail was true. History and Hollywood myth are seldom the same, but in this one small case I was able to smile, because Hollywood, for once, had got things right.

Bryan Burrough is the author of Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 Public Enemies opens nationwide, July 3