When her delusions are exposed by her young lover, Norma, a glittering narcissist, murders him. She was played by Gloria Swanson, also a great star of silent films: Sunset Boulevard was her Salome, her comeback. It is a cruel and brilliant film, and its reach is long. Norma is fictional, but her story created the idea that the average famous, incalculably gifted woman is insane. We all know that Hollywood does terrible things to its women: objectification at best, rape at worst. We talk less about how we diminish, and erase, their art, in which they are invited to collude.

I thought of Sunset Boulevard when I watched Maria, the new biopic about Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie. It is, in many ways, a remake of Sunset Boulevard, and Jolie plays Norma, though I suspect she doesn’t know it. Norma yearned for the close-up and the scene where a lighting technician shines the beam on her is the best in the film. “Let’s get a good look at you,” he calls from his eyrie. He doesn’t mean it. The real inner woman is of no interest to Hollywood. She just reflects the light. Jolie loves the close-up too: she has internalized something.

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Most films about famous female entertainers are variants on Sunset Boulevard. We have Sunset Boulevard starring Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland (Judy), Sunset Boulevard starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe (Blonde); Sunset Boulevard starring Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse (Back to Black); now we have Maria too, the latest gilded film to call the subject of its devotion mad. You might say that Garland, Monroe and Winehouse were all mad: all were addicted to drugs, and they died young. But madness wasn’t their defining characteristic, even if these films insist on it. Their industry treated them as things, first alive, now dead: as a young actress Monroe was invited to expose her breasts to studio executives and Garland, given drugs to make her work as a teenager, was not allowed to rest. It was the same for Winehouse.

Maria is a film about the best-selling classical singer in history, and the most important opera singer of the 20th century. This is not a controversial view, and it is not disputed. Callas lost her voice early for a singer — we’re not sure why — and she had a relationship with the shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis — we’re also not sure why — who later married Jackie Kennedy. Neither of these facts, though unfortunate, can erase Callas’s contribution to music. Unless you are her cinematic biographer, that is.

Like Sunset Boulevard, Maria opens with a death bed: her own. It is 1977, and Callas is 53, or she was. She is lying on the floor of her exquisite Paris apartment, dead as newsprint. Then we travel backwards in time to the previous week. Maria, tended by servants who act as parents, is broken. She has lost her voice and her lover, the tiny Onassis. She is addicted to Mandrax, which she hides from the servants, and she feeds her meals to the dogs. This is the material of the obsessed but unseeing biographer. It is not Callas. They just use her name, as if for branding.

Sophia Lambton, classical music critic and author of The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, tells me this is fiction. Callas listened to her records all her life: Maria says she feared them. She did not call her records perfect. She was not reclusive. Onassis did not hate opera or try to thwart her career: and she left him, not he her. She suffered from low blood pressure and died of a heart attack, but she was not a drug addict.

The real Callas was made happy by music, but Maria is not interested in music. The result, of course, is lifeless, and Jolie plays Callas as a poised corpse. Craving profundity in every shot, Maria lands on South Park with better clothes. With an already-dead heroine, the only real drama is: where to put the grand piano? By the end everyone is so emotionally cauterized, only the dogs are capable of a response. The credits thank Cartier: perhaps that was the point of it all.

Maria insists Callas was cursed. Judy (2019), another retelling of Sunset Boulevard with Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland / Norma Desmond, does the same: again, it begins at the ending, a place without hope. It is set in 1969, the year of her death, when she was gravely ill. If you hoped this film might be an homage to Garland’s contribution to music — to her fleeting joy, and the joy she gave — you are wrong. There is no music, just sickness, as if that were Garland’s only legacy. Yet watch her dance with Fred Astaire in Easter Parade and outdance him! Garland’s voice does not appear in Judy. Zellweger sang for her, as Marisa Abela sang for Amy Winehouse in Back to Black (2024), and she won the Oscar denied to Garland in her lifetime. Garland thought Hollywood hated her. Whether it knew it or not, she was right.

Perhaps the most vicious retelling of Sunset Boulevard is Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022). It is from a Joyce Carol Oates novel that seethes with envy, and it dealt with Marilyn Monroe. There is a scene where Monroe’s soon-to-be-aborted son begs to live — this scene is set in her vagina, while, elsewhere, his useless mother, who was really an autodidact and the greatest comic actress in film, chokes on JFK’s cock. Monroe is reduced to loveless acts in pursuit of a father who will not return. Blonde is framed as a search for the father, and, in such quests, the heroine is turned again into a child, though, in Monroe’s case, an obscene one: a child who cannot even be a child, though in reality she could steal a scene from Jack Lemmon. Some sick child.

But this is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder’s, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema’s most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.

It probably wouldn’t work, he said. The audience for opera is in London. I told him I disagreed. We had both just witnessed first-hand a large and enthusiastic audience for opera in Greater Manchester, after all. Not only could the move work, but it would also be a great thing for the UK to have a leading company operating out of one of its most central and fast-growing cities. Allied with Opera North, whose production we had just watched and who tour the entire region from Leeds, it would make this part of the country a global opera powerhouse.

By the time I got off the bus, my companion was telling me how a Manchester ENO would allow talented musicians like him to stay in the North after graduating, rather than feeling forced to move to London, or overseas. “I’m just surprised that you are the only person making the argument,” he said.

The reason nobody has heard the case for a Manchester ENO is that the media coverage of this important arts story has been laughably, atrociously London-centric. “English National Opera fights ‘absurd’ plan to relocate to Manchester,” ran the headline of a story on the BBC. It quoted the ENO’s chief executive Stuart Murphy calling the move “insane” but didn’t counter his analysis with a single northern voice.

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Several newspaper reports accepted, apparently without fact-checking, Murphy’s comparison of London’s “9 million people” with “Manchester’s half a million”. It seems neither the reporters nor the editors on those papers could see the mistake the ENO chief was making, although it seems that Northern readers pointed out the problem to the Guardian. The paper has removed Murphy’s misleading quote and replaced it with “a more accurate comparison between the greater metropolitan populations of London and Manchester”. (The population of Greater Manchester is almost 3 million.)

The ignorance didn’t end there. The Observer’s classical music critic Fiona Maddocks said the ENO plans “certainly make no sense” because Manchester is already “well served” by Opera North — a company that is based in Leeds and usually only comes to Salford for one week every year. Maddocks, perhaps, was straying a little outside her area of expertise: the Observer’s classical desk, as one of my readers emailed me this week, “pretty much exclusively writes about things staged in London”. The reader went on to point out that whereas Opera North’s headquarters, at Leeds’ Howard Assembly Room, are an hour and a half’s drive from central Manchester, “the ENO is about six minutes’ walk away from the Royal Opera House, so who is best served?”

It’s understandable that the art world is shaken by the idea of the ENO moving. It is a loss for most of the people making and writing about opera, because they live in London. And it makes sense for an industry to fight against imminent job losses, and to complain that the decision has been made without proper planning or pitch-rolling in the North. What is unforgivable is that the media acted as a supportive chorus for London-based vested interests. I’ve yet to see a story in the national press that doesn’t frame the ENO funding decision as a disastrous folly or a betrayal of the arts. (Melvyn Bragg, also in the Observer, described the Arts Council decision as “stealing arts cash from London”, as though the capital is entitled to as much as it likes from the national coffers.) And it’s not just me who clocks this London-centricity in British journalism — and hates it.

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“It’s all been reported as ‘London is losing this thing’,” says a journalist from a national newspaper who I spoke to this week (who asked me not to use their name). “So they fucking should,” they went on. “Why should that be in London? If that’s taxpayer funded, if it’s the ‘National Opera’, why shouldn’t it be in Manchester? Why should Manchester residents have to travel to London?”

That journalist is one of the very small cohort of national newspaper correspondents not based in London, covering a patch that can only be described as “the rest of the country”. Of course, that’s impossible. “You’re not covering the country — you’re covering what Londoners want to read about the rest of the country,” this person told me, pointing out that the tabloids are better staffed out here in the wilds than the broadsheets are.

As the coverage of the ENO story makes clear, we don’t have a national press. We have lots of London newspapers whose claim to be national ranges from wafer thin — the Guardian has a staff of four in Manchester — to arguably fraudulent. Most of the national newspapers in England have fewer than five staff correspondents outside London. Some “nationals” don’t appear to have a single one.

“They call themselves national because they are sold in a shop in Cumbria, but they’re not national,” one northern editor told me this week. The papers that claim to speak for the whole country are, in the view of this seasoned reporter, clever variations on the London Evening Standard.

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That’s the paper where I spent the first five years of my career, by the way. I’m a southerner who values the capital’s diverse and noisy journalistic scene. What’s annoying isn’t that the London media exists and is strong and argues eloquently and passionately for the protection and extension of London’s privileges — it’s that it does those things while pretending to be the national media. It makes total sense that newspapers whose editors and reporters almost all live in a single city would reflect that city’s interests and blind spots. But it doesn’t make for very satisfying coverage for those of us living elsewhere.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their favourite examples of London-centric media coverage following the ENO debacle, the answers came thick and fast. One theme was the assumption that everyone lives in London. There was a piece in the Sunday Times property section about moving to York which listed one of the downsides as: “It’s so far away.” There was a column in the New Statesman in which a well-meaning political journalist wrote: “In my view, every journalist should make a New Year’s resolution to get out of London more.”

Lots of replies to my tweet mentioned weather coverage, from the trivial — snow coverage tends to kick in when it’s snowing in the South East — to the rather sad. “When the North East had awful weather early last year, some areas of Northumberland had to wait weeks for all utilities to be restored,” one person wrote, noting that the story and its impact on millions of people was sparsely covered in the national news.

What shocks me, as a relative newcomer to the North, is how bad the public transport is — and how little I’d been prepared for it by reading the national (sorry, London) newspapers. There is no way that the current state of the North’s railways — appalling; unbelievable — would be allowed to continue if it were happening in the South East. It’s often journalists personally experiencing things that lead them to prioritise a story, and very few of them are experiencing the 23 cancelled services every day from Manchester to Leeds.

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Imagine if this kind of disruption took place anywhere near London — actually, we don’t have to imagine: remember the Southern Rail strikes, reported as if it were a national emergency — the editors who frame our national debate would be firing off angry emails to their columnists and news editors from freezing platforms. The stink would be so great that ministers would be forced to drop everything and fix it within days. And yet up here, month after month, despite the attempts of local politicians to raise the issue, the crisis drags on, paralysing large swathes of the country.

After Brexit there seemed to be a moment of self-reflection in the British press, from certain columnists at least, regarding the abject failure to understand the brewing feelings and major demographic shifts that drove a seismic political event that few in London saw coming. But the reason for that short-sightedness was structural, not something a few fleeting trips to the high streets (never the more-important suburbs) of Northern towns is going to fix.

The structural problem is that if you have 95% of your workforce living in one world, you are going to miss a lot of important stories in all the other worlds that make up this country. “You have got an insane number of people sitting together in the same room with the same lives and talking about the same experiences,” as one Northern correspondent put it to me. “It’s utterly bizarre.”

I’m writing this article from The Mill’s office on Cross Street, over the road from where The Manchester Guardian used to be based. That building has long gone and is now a Boots, with a small plaque on the outside wall marking its former use. Within walking distance there used to be massive northern newspaper offices for the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail — an ecosystem, referred to as “the other Fleet Street”, that lasted for half of the twentieth century.

Technological change put an end to those operations and drove a radical centralisation of our media in London. But the technology we have now means that any news organisation can quite easily have dozens of reporters spread across every region. Suddenly, we would see a different kind of journalism creeping into the papers — one that tells us less about meaningless jockeying between random 20-something political advisors in Westminster, and more about how government policy is impacting people’s lives; how people hundreds of miles from the centre of power are experiencing the British state. The benefits of de-Londonising the media will flow far beyond journalism into policymaking and the nation’s understanding of itself. The newspapers could decide tomorrow that they want to represent this country properly again. And if they want us to call them nationals, they should.

Last month, the company proudly announced that its Nixon had been nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Yet less than 48 hours later, the company withdrew from the nomination and issued a grovelling apology for causing “offence”. It begged for “space” to learn from its errors.

What had changed between 2020 and 2021? The meltdown among global elites over systemic racism after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. In this fevered, racialised atmosphere, the hapless Scottish Opera committed an offence that heretofore no one had known existed.

The company’s transgression lay in casting white singers in the roles of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, consistent with over three decades of performance practice. The fact that a black baritone sang the role of President Nixon, a first for Nixon in China, earned the Scottish Opera no protection from accusations of racism.

“Yellowface in opera has to stop,” commented British baritone, Julian Chou-Lambert. “It’s like blackface, but applied to East and South-East Asian characters. It’s offensive and dehumanising for ESEA people. Opera folks, please learn about this and do better.” A Scottish MP from the Labour Party, Sarah Owen, lamented the paucity of Asians in the production and the “exaggerated winged eye make-up”. She wondered ominously if Nixon in China had received taxpayer funding.

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The company tried to defend itself by explaining that its production “intended to portray the character of Chairman Mao as old and in ill-health and in no way were we trying to change his ethnicity”. Not good enough. “There is clear photographic evidence,” an obscure advocacy group called BEATS (British East & Southeast Asians in Theatre and on Screen) shot back, “that the practice of yellowface was employed on dancers in the production.”

Apart from BEATS, Chou-Lambert, and MP Sarah Owen, there was no groundswell of outrage against the Scottish Opera and its arts nomination. Nevertheless, the company caved immediately to its detractors. It issued a statement of classic neo-Stalinist self-abnegation: “We are deeply sorry for the offence caused by the casting of our 2020 production of John Adam’s Nixon in China. We are also sorry for any misrepresentation caused by the stage make-up.” Though the company practices diversity in casting, “we accept there is a lot more work still to be done. . . . Once again, our heartfelt apologies to everyone, most especially our ESEA communities.”

If the Scottish Opera owes these “communities” an apology for “yellowface” and “whitewashing” (defined by BEATS as using non-Asian singers for Chinese roles), so do the creators of Nixon in China and nearly every director that has mounted the opera since its 1987 premiere in Houston.

It would be hard to come up with a more progressive team of collaborators than Nixon in China’s composer (Adams), inaugural director (Peter Sellars), librettist (Alice Goodman), and original choreographer (Mark Morris). Peter Sellars reigned for years as the enfant terrible of opera, updating operas to modern times and Left-wing politics, sometimes imaginatively, more often anachronistically. When Sellars ceased being an enfant, he continued being merely terrible. He opines regularly on social justice from the lectern and in his capacity as regisseur.

His Nixon in China staging, for example, was inspired by the Reagan White House, he said in a 1994 interview. Reagan and his cronies were “tearing the country apart”, “dividing profits among their close friends, slashing budgets, putting cities deeply in the hole,” while distracting the country with photo ops. In response, Sellars and librettist Goodman sprinkled elephant jokes throughout that first production.

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The elephant imagery did double duty, referring not just to the GOP but also to operatic imperialism. Verdi’s Aida was playing concurrently with Nixon in China at the Houston Grand Opera. According to Sellars, Aida raises questions about the “imperialist tradition” of grand opera. Since many in Nixon in China’s audience would also have seen Aida the night before or after, the Nixon collaborators were, he said, “quite consciously commenting” on what it means to move an opera plot into Egypt.

And yet, despite Sellars’ exquisite sensibilities about imperialism and cultural appropriation, it apparently never occurred to him or to his colleagues that they were committing a racial transgression by casting all white singers for the original Nixon in China production. Within a few years of its Houston premiere, Nixon in China had been performed in Brooklyn, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Bielefeld, Germany, Los Angeles and Paris. Those casts, too, were virtually all white.

And when Adams, Sellars and Mark Morris got together again in 2011 for the opera’s premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the lead Chinese characters were once more all white. No one protested. Indeed, the New York Times’ lead classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, singled out one of those white Nixon in China singers, Robert Brubaker, as capturing Chairman Mao’s “authoritarian defiance and rapacious self-indulgence.” Today, Tommasini is lambasting classical music for its racism (see “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact,” City Journal, Summer 2021); in 2011, he did not mention Brubaker’s race.

That blindness to whitewashing continued into 2020. In its review of the Scottish Opera’s Nixon in China, The Guardian, hardly a conservative mouthpiece, praised both Mark Le Brocq as Chairman Mao and Nicholas Lester as Zhou Enlai.

A norm against “whitewashing” would make Nixon in China almost impossible to stage in the West, an anonymous source told the Telegraph recently. Finding enough Asian singers of requisite quality to fill the large roster of Chinese characters “in a country the other side of the world from China” would be “just too difficult”.

Nixon in China’s creators would presumably have an interest in defending their work and its production history against a potentially fatal new casting restriction. They are keeping out of the fray, however. When I asked John Adams if he thinks that it is problematic to cast a white tenor as Mao Zedong, he declined to comment. Peter Sellers also refused comment.

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And so it is left to BEATS to explain the nuances of yellowface and whitewashing. Why is it acceptable for a black singer to sing Nixon but not acceptable for a white singer to sing Mao or Zhou Enlai? I asked. The answer turns on whether a singer’s skin color helps or hurts a political agenda.

“Casting a black singer (or other Artist of Colour – AoC) as a white historical personage can be progressive,” the group responded, “as it works to balance out the historical and current exclusion of AoCs on stage, and the discrimination they have experienced, and continue to experience”. But “casting a white actor in a specifically non-white role, such as a Chinese historical personage, is regressive, as it perpetuates the exclusion of ESEAs (East & South-East Asians) from the stage.”

But no singer is presently “excluded” from roles because of his race. Asians and blacks have sung leading white characters in Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Bizet, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Offenbach, in the world’s major opera houses. If there are fewer Asian singers on opera stages than in the orchestra pit, that is because Asian involvement with Western classical music began with the string instruments. But training in Western opera techniques is catching up fast.

Staying current with “progressive” casting rules will require full-time study. Would it be acceptable for a black singer to play a Chinese character such as Mao, I asked BEATS. Not really. Here pan-Asian casting would be recommended. So artists of colour may bump whites from white roles but different categories of AoC’s should enjoy monopolies over their respective identity-defined characters.

For an organisation intent on policing identity boundaries in art, BEATS is remarkably lax in defining those boundaries. A Korean or Japanese singer may perform Mao or Zhou Enlai, the advocacy group said in response to a further question —notwithstanding the large differences in culture and history between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese.

In fact, all the groups which BEATS regards as interchangeable for the purpose of casting are wildly heterogeneous. Individuals from the following countries may substitute for each other in roles written for any particular nationality: “Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and their diasporas.”

Never mind that many of these peoples spent millennia subjugating and colonising each other. Today, their most important characteristic is that they are not white, so someone from Brunei may sing a Chinese Communist leader even though Brunei had almost no connection with either Imperial or Communist China. Someone from Brunei could also sing Madama Butterfly, even though Japan invaded and occupied Brunei during World War II. This conflation of distinct identities under one “Asian” umbrella is little different from the “Orientalist” tropes decried by Edward Said and his epigones.

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Such ecumenicism is already behind the curve, however. To see the future of the diversity crusade in the arts, one must, as always, look to the United States, where casting directors henceforth will need a spectrometer to decide if a performer is sufficiently “coloured” to fill a role.

At the moment when the Scottish Opera was self-destructing, In the Heights, a screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical, landed in American movie theatres. It, too, had an immaculately progressive creative team, with Miranda writing the screenplay and Jon Chu directing. The movie, about New York’s Dominican community, which is concentrated in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, received generally favourable press.

Miranda’s diversity credentials would seem unassailable, given his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as rap-emitting black and Hispanic citizens in the musical Hamilton. In the Heights used an all-Hispanic cast, thus obeying the rule that whites may not play person of colour roles. But the diversity racket has moved beyond such blunt categories. One critic complained that the actors in In the Heights were not dark-skinned enough, even though the proportion of dark-skinned actors among the lead characters — 16% —matches the racial demographics of Washington Heights.

A new offence was born, which may be dubbed “brownwashing.” Miranda fell on his sword immediately. “In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short,” he tweeted. “I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it… I promise to do better in my future projects, and I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honouring our diverse and vibrant community.”

Every time arts leaders and institutions cave to racial pressure, they deal creativity another blow. The dumb literalism of today’s censors is a frontal assault on the human imagination, which frees us from the constraints of time, place, and the boundaries of our own subjectivity. One of drama’s most mesmerising set pieces is an onstage actor putting on his make-up and costume, effacing one identity and taking on another right before our eyes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a classic of erotic literature because transforming oneself into another being is an act of God-like power and seduction, whether of an amorous target or of an audience.

The next step in imaginative emasculation is obvious: Only elderly actors can play King Lear, only hunchbacks can sing Rigoletto or play Richard III, only fat people can play or sing Falstaff, since using stage make-up and body suits to transform non-old, non-handicapped, and non-fat actors into those roles represents ageism, fat-shaming, and ableism. Certainly no straight actor will ever be able to play a gay or “trans” character, as Sean Penn recently observed. But then again, maybe only Falstaff should be able to play Falstaff, since surely between a fat actor and Falstaff himself there are significant differences of identity. Jorge Luis Borges could have figured this puzzler out, but not the rest of us.

Ultimately, theatre itself may have to be segregated, since to claim that a white audience can identify with a black-themed work is a more subtle form of cultural appropriation. A recent play, lauded twice by the New York Times, asked white audience members to leave the theatre before the play’s conclusion so that black attendees could experience undisturbed racial solidarity.

Imaginative empathy—the ability to project oneself into someone else’s shoes–has been a key to expanding liberty and toleration. The arts have played a crucial role in widening human understanding. Now, however, they are leading the way back into a world of tribal barriers and stunted experience.