Wit & Attitude Quote by Peter Shaffer

The line lands like a slap because it weaponizes taste. Shaffer stages opera not as high art but as a social ritual where people perform refinement while secretly bored, irritated, or vaguely aroused by the wrong things. “Male sopranos screeching” compresses an entire tradition into a single ugly verb: screeching. It’s not an argument; it’s a demolition. The speaker is less interested in opera’s actual music than in puncturing the reverence around it, exposing how cultural prestige can become a substitute for feeling.

The “stupid fat couples” detail is deliberately cruel, and that cruelty is doing work. It’s a class-and-body jab aimed at the audience as much as the art: the kind of people who use opera as a date-night alibi for intimacy, rolling their eyes in shared contempt while congratulating themselves for showing up. The insult implies a deadened erotic economy: they can’t access desire directly, so they outsource it to a grand spectacle and then mock it to feel superior. That’s the subtext of “That’s not love.” Love, here, isn’t romance; it’s attention, vulnerability, the capacity to be moved without irony.

Calling it “just rubbish” isn’t philistinism so much as a character’s defensive posture. Shaffer, who wrote obsessively about obsession, worship, and the thin line between ecstasy and disgust, understands how people protect themselves from overwhelming art by reducing it to noise and caricature. The line dramatizes a modern fear: that sincerity is embarrassing, and that the safest seat in the theater is the one where you can sneer.