
Pro-Palestinian protest prompts scuffle onstage at Royal Opera House in London
Images posted on social media show what appears to be a member of the chorus holding the unfurled flag in front of his chest while the lead singers bask in the audience's applause. After a few moments, someone backstage attempts to grab the flag, but the performer holds onto the banner and snaps back into place.
Singers were taking their bows after the end of the opera by Giuseppe Verdi. Director Adele Thomas' production reinterprets the story of desire and an all-consuming curse, the opera said.
'The display of the flag was spontaneous and unauthorized action by the artist,'' the opera company said in a statement. 'It was not approved by the Royal Ballet & Opera and is not in line with our commitment to political impartiality.'
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Paul McCartney's 1985 Live Aid performance, his first live show in five years, was nearly derailed by a tech glitch
Paul McCartney hadn't taken the stage in over five years when he sat down at his piano to sing 'Let It Be' for Live Aid on July 13, 1985, in a performance that was almost totally derailed by a single tech glitch. There the music legend was – performing live for the first time since his post-Beatles band Wings had broken up, and his lifelong friend and Beatles bandmate John Lennon had been assassinated – to sing 'Let It Be,' one of the last songs the Fab Four ever released… and minutes into the performance, McCartney's microphone died. 'One guy. A mic and a piano (and) a mic for the voice. Really simple. What happened?' Live Aid organizer and musician Bob Geldof recalled thinking at the time in CNN's 'Live Aid: When Rock 'n' Roll Took On the World.' Geldof added that he thought, 'Oh no, it's going to be a disaster.' All of the estimated 1.8 billion viewers tuning into the mega benefit concert couldn't even hear McCartney, let alone the massive crowd that stood before him at London's Wembley Stadium. Then something magical happened: the crowd started to sing along and help pick up the song for McCartney. But it wasn't just the crowd who saw that McCartney needed help, either. 'There were a bunch of people standing around and either Pete (Townshend, of The Who) or David (Bowie) said to me, 'Come on, let's help him.' Literally if you can think of a moment where 'I am not worthy' is beyond true, it's that moment,' Geldof recalled. Townshend, Bowie, Geldof and singer Alison Moyet huddled behind McCartney on stage to help him sing the song's final verses when the microphones started to work again, allowing the impromptu quintet – along with the singing Wembley crowd – to complete the song. Afterward, Townshend and McCartney hoisted Geldof on their shoulders before the Wembley Stadium headliners, including George Michael, Bono, members of The Who, Bowie, McCartney, Queen and many more, all joined together on stage to sing Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas' to close out the show. Return to the stage The Live Aid benefit was organized by musicians Geldof and Midge Ure to draw attention to a famine in Ethiopia. It spanned multiple locations, drew nearly two billion viewers around the world and raised more than US$125 million for relief efforts. While Geldof had already secured a lineup of the most famous and revered rock 'n roll musicians for Live Aid, he said in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock earlier this month that he felt he needed a Beatle to participate and wrote McCartney a letter at the time outlining his case, asking him to play one song at the end of the show. 'I knew he must get a hundred requests to do things, but I really felt like the program would not be complete without him there. I was not writing to Paul McCartney, the man, I said, but to PAUL MCCARTNEY, the phenomenon,' Geldof explained. 'If he played, millions would watch who would not otherwise watch. That would mean money would come in that would not otherwise come in.' McCartney and his band Wings hadn't performed since 1979's Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, and shortly thereafter disbanded in 1981. McCartney hadn't taken the stage after that but did continue to release new music over the next few years. So when Geldof approached him about Live Aid, McCartney recalled telling him, 'I can't Bob, I haven't got a band together now.' Geldof, according to McCartney, didn't find that to be a problem at all, telling him, 'Well, you just sit at the piano and play your own number.' Ultimately, McCartney agreed. 'I just had to come. Simple as that,' McCartney said, adding that Geldof was also the person who chose the song that McCartney would sing. 'He's running the whole bloody show!' Geldof told Ultimate Classic Rock that 'there is a hierarchy in rock 'n' roll,' with the Beatles being at the top. 'So he goes on, one song, to give U.S. the benediction, to give U.S. the Beatles imprimatur, and of course it's 'Let It Be,' which I had asked him to do.' Live Aid wound up not just being McCartney's return for a one-off performance. He's been touring regularly ever since – even up until today, as McCartney, now 83, is set to continue his Get Back tour in the U.S. this fall. Turns out, the legendary musician isn't quite ready to just let it be. By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN


CTV News
8 hours ago
- CTV News
‘We're all about community and family': Third annual Island Fest hits downtown London
The sights and sounds of the Caribbean can be found in downtown London this weekend. The third annual Island Fest is underway at Covent Garden Market Rotary Square and Talbot Street. The event features vendors, food, and performers from as far away as Trinidad. There's also a Kiddie Corner. Cherie Leslie, marketing and social media director, says it gives people a chance to soak up Caribbean Culture in the heart of the city. 'In the Caribbean, we're all about community and family, so it's nice to bring the community and family to London here as well,' said Leslie. 'Many moons ago, we used to have these kind of festivals, then they kind of disappeared. So, we decided it was time to bring them back, and here we are, and every year they ask for when's it going to come back, and what we're expecting, so it's great to know that people actually want to see this and come out to support.' Island Fest is a free event, which runs through the weekend.


National Post
10 hours ago
- National Post
Colby Cosh: The tortured vulnerability of Ozzy Osbourne
Article content Sharon has become a global celebrity in her own right, and you can underline those last four words if you like, but that's not Sharon on 'Crazy Train' or 'Mr. Crowley,' either. It almost feels like a category mistake for Ozzy's obituaries to emphasize heavy metal per se, because most metal vocalists aren't anything like Ozzy and can't do what he did, even though many of them have far more pure singing talent. Article content The accepted model of the metal frontman is a strutting peacock of a man, an avatar of imperative power and toughness. On his best records Ozzy is more of a mad prophetic conduit, someone lifted onto a higher plane and brought back to Earth in an obviously damaged state, raving in Blakean riddles as the music thunders ominously around him. Article content In other words, he possessed a tortured vulnerability that really suited the Sabbatarian horror movies. Nobody else could have represented quite the same attitude while singing of being lost in the wheels of confusion or looking through the hole in the sky. A particularly fine example occurs on 'Snowblind' from the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (1972). 'Snowblind' is a song about cocaine, written (by Butler) for the single most cocaine-influenced record ever made in a heavily cocaine-dependent musical genre. Cocaine is thanked in the liner notes of that LP. And the song starts off with a shimmering Sibelius quality that kind of makes you want to try cocaine: Article content Article content But a few minutes into the track, Bill Ward pulls his boots on, the stillness lurches into a pell-mell boogie, the schoolboy snow metaphor is dropped, and all of a sudden Ozzy becomes a whining alleyway junkie, defending himself exasperatedly — perhaps in the face of what we would now call an intervention. Article content Ozzy, who continued struggling with drug use for three more decades, must have said stupid self-justifying words like these with total conviction a thousand times. They ring so true that you wonder whether Geezer Butler transcribed them directly. And they can only have been addressed to a concerned loved one, to a parent or sweetheart or comrade who had said something like 'Hey, ease up, I don't want you to die.' Notice how every line strikes a different note about drug addiction. 'You think you're better than me?'; 'You don't understand how bad I need it'; 'To hell with all you squares anyway'; 'It brings me a peace I've never known when sober.' Article content Article content Somehow this stanza fell into a love letter to cocaine made by cokeheads while on industrial amounts of coke. Are these words in earnest, or are they an ironic acknowledgment that Black Sabbath has cornered itself in a bad place? Ozzy's pleading vocals preserve the priceless ambiguity, the sense of fragility: 'Snowblind' would never have turned out that way at any other time or with any other singer. It's not a coincidence that Lester Bangs, the magisterial drug-abusing critic who had previously complained of Sabbath's leadenness, suddenly started comparing them to Dylan when Vol. 4 came out. Article content