Why I want to punctuate like a girl

I speak, through clenched and grinding teeth, of Australian theatrical directors.

My teeth are a little clenched because I have just been to Opera Australia's production in the Sydney Opera House of Christoph Willibald Gluck's much-loved, much-staged opera Orpheus and Eurydice.

As is so often the way with tickets-on-themselves theatrical directors this production's director Yaron Lifschitz chose to vastly "improve" (my inverted commas) upon composer Gluck's silly old ideas (so 18th century) about what his, Christoph Willibald's, own opera is about.

This kind of "I'm a genius, I know best!" thinking on the parts of theatre directors is a close cousin of the kind of thinking that must have gone through prime minister Scott Morrison's ego-inflamed mind when he appointed himself to five ministerial positions.

But that's not one of my best analogies. Perhaps a better one here is the way in which Winston Churchill, an amateur painter, took it upon himself to alter-improve paintings of the old masters (even of Rubens!) hanging on the walls of Chequers his prime ministerial country mansion.

But I digress. Gluck, if last weekend he was there in the Opera House in spirit (and I think he was, I'm sure I saw him, his pale-with-horror face luminous in the darkened theatre) would have been oft bewildered. He would have been bemused by Lifschitz's setting of the action in a lunatic asylum (why?) and by Lifschitz's idea that love and death are somehow the same thing (but they're not!), requiring that the production end with Orpheus and Eurydice and all the other lunatics dropping dead.

Those of us used to Gluck's idea that the opera should end with husband and wife Orpheus and Eurydice at last ecstatically together in one another's arms struggle with the silliness of a production that ends in an asylum strewn with dead lunatics. The silliness of it!

But it was ever thus. All opera enthusiasts have suffered knicker-knotting avant-garde productions of their favourite operas. Don't get me started on the radical-atheist Opera Australia production of Wagner's meant-to-be ultra-Christian Tannhauser.

Shakespeare enthusiasts too suffer big-headed director's maulings of their favourite Shakespeare plays. My boxer shorts are still knotted by last year's vaunted Sydney production of The Tempest that bristled with the director's woke preachings about the First Australians and the injustices done to them.

It wasn't that I disagreed with the director's personal opinions about Australian public life. No, it's that I think Shakespeare is such a giant (of words and thoughts and theatrical drama) that today's minor Australian theatre pygmies are unlikely to ever improve his works with their own small, wriggly ideas.

But great, great works can usually rise above the worst that directors can do to them and generally I loved this Orpheus and Eurydice.

Gluck's sublime but no-frills music survived intact and I still had the little private, silent, weep every sensitive person has during Orpheus' aria "Che faro" as he laments his beloved's death.

It may be that my emotional ability to feel uplifted to tears by some moments in some operas (the cliché "reduced to tears" makes no sense when those tears are triggered by heightened feelings) is another aspect of my treasured feminine side. Certainly it (crying at opera) is something no real man would ever do.

MORE IAN WARDEN:

And (what rapture!) just this week I learn from a new piece, Anne Helen Petersen's A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point! in the online Culture Study that my lifelong love of the use of the exclamation mark in my writing and in everybody's is a female thing. Goodonme!

She shows how women are always under pressure, especially in their workplaces, not to use them, to instead "use punctuation like a man", to go through every email they ever write and to replace every exclamation point with a full-stop.

Petersen shows that sexistly in our society, the open shows of emotion that exclamation points indicate are thought unbecomingly girly and hysterical, and typical of those flibbertigibbets the emotion-prone second sex. Written language, male wisdom saith, should be soberly, passionlessly, stone-facedly, unemotionally male.

Joy! Bliss! Ecstasy! Thank you Ms Petersen! You show that my fondness for exclamation points (they abound in my emails and texts too as well as in my professional writing, for open expression of one's exuberances and passions requires them and to write without them is to be just a male miserabilist) is yet another dimension of my treasured female side.

It is right up there with other female traits of mine such as my deepening disinclination to vote Liberal (ugh! the very thought of it!), with all research showing women's abandonment of the misogynist Liberals was a powerful factor in booting the manly-misogynist Morrison government out of office.

I'll read Ms Petersen's wittily feminist piece again in a moment but first I must bustle out into my flower garden, singing, to pick the prettiest of flowers. Then I will beautifully arrange them (for flower-arranging is another of my unmanly joys in life) in one of the most beautiful of my collection of exquisite vases.

The man who is tired of flower arranging, and of using exclamation marks to express his joy in being alive, is tired of life!