"The Phantom of the Opera: Magical Lasso" "The Phantom of the Opera" is a beloved and timeless musical that tells the haunting tale of the mysterious and disfigured phantom who lurks beneath the Paris Opera House. While the story is filled with intrigue, romance, and beautiful music, one fascinating element that captivates audiences is the phantom's use of a magical lasso. The magical lasso, also known as the phantom's lasso of truth, is a significant symbol in the musical. It serves as a tool for the phantom to manipulate, control, and intimidate those around him. The lasso represents his power and dominance over others, as it allows him to reveal their deepest secrets and darkest desires. It's a metaphor for the phantom's ability to ensnare and control the people within the opera house, particularly Christine Daaé, the young and talented soprano whom he obsesses over.
It's a metaphor for the phantom's ability to ensnare and control the people within the opera house, particularly Christine Daaé, the young and talented soprano whom he obsesses over. The phantom's use of the magical lasso is carefully crafted throughout the show. In one iconic scene, the phantom uses the lasso to physically and emotionally trap Christine, binding her to him and forcing her to confront the truth about her own desires and fears.
Lady Violet Manners: ‘The politicising of the National Trust has to stop’
“I loathe the word ‘woke’ so much.” Lady Violet Manners says it as if describing a poison. It is a dislike shared by many others in the culture wars that are currently gripping our national life, making every conversation a minefield.
But the 30-year-old daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, a former Dolce & Gabbana model turned successful podcaster and film-maker, is about to take anti-wokeness further than most. She is putting her head above the parapet to challenge what she regards as its damaging effect on one of Britain’s most revered institutions, the National Trust.
The charity’s staid image as a favourite refuge for the middle classes in search of culture and a lovely tearoom has been shaken since it published a report in 2020 highlighting links between some of its properties and the slave trade. Prominent critics – including former supreme court justice Lord Sumption – have accused it of straying far beyond its core heritage brief by, for example, opposing recent government moves to water down pollution targets for housebuilders and adopting a 2030 net zero target for the organisation. For her part, Hillary McGrady, the National Trust director, has revealed that she has received anonymous death threats.
Manners has joined the battle for its future by putting her name forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the trust’s advisory council. The 36-member body is evenly split between nominees of heritage organisations and those voted in by the organisation’s 5.7 million members. The powers of the council are limited but if successful, Manners – “despite having something [a title] in front of my first name, I am Violet first and foremost” – will spend her three-year term of office playing a part in the appointment of trustees, in regular gatherings with the trust’s management team to discuss strategic issues, and in monitoring the trust’s work in caring for its 250,000 hectares of farmland, 780 miles of coastlines, and 500 plus historic properties and gardens in its portfolio.
“Needless to say,” she explains, “I’ve never put myself forward for anything like this before.” We are sitting in The Surprise, a fashionable gastro-pub in a quiet square off the Kings Road in Chelsea, London, owned by a friend and not far from her Ladbroke Grove home. At first she speaks so quickly that I can’t help thinking, despite her air of outward self-possession with her sleek, shoulder-length long hair and business-like, well-cut trouser suit, she is experiencing a few nerves in what is the first interview of her election campaign. Her big eyes appear slightly wary.
Why, I wonder, does she start with, “needless to say”? “Well, until last year, it hadn’t crossed my mind [to stand for anything] but coming out of Covid, I feel like the fog has finally lifted. I’ve been looking a little laterally about what I really care about and what I really want to put my time towards.”
Her talk of lateral thinking may owe something to vocabulary learnt in the year immediately before Covid that she spent in Los Angeles studying a business and finance diploma at UCLA. She hasn’t, though, allowed any mid-Atlantic twang to creep into her upper-class English accent, but she confides that her friends (said to include Diana, Princess of Wales’s niece, Lady Kitty Spencer, David Cameron’s nephew, Gus, and Otis Ferry, son of rock star Bryan who dated her sister Alice) “tease me relentlessly” for having a hint of Yorkshire mixed in there somewhere, a legacy from her boarding school days at Queen Margaret’s, south of York.
What comes over most strongly about Manners from the very start is her determination to carve out a role for herself in life, where what she has learnt growing up at the turreted Belvoir (pronounced beaver) Castle near Grantham can be put to good use. “My sisters and I [with younger siblings Alice and Eliza, once referred to in society pages as the “Bad Manners Girls” after their late-teenage parties at their Fulham house regularly upset the neighbours] were told by my mum that we had to go and create our own lives, and that is what we have all done.”
Vanity Fair described Violet and her siblings as the real-life version of Downton Abbey’s Crawley sisters Credit : David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Casadei
Her mother, the Duchess, who was born Emma Watkins into a Welsh farming family and had been an estate agent before her marriage to David Manners, the 11th Duke, is clearly a practical, down-to-earth type. And in practical terms there wasn’t a role for her daughters at Belvoir because, as is the way in such aristocratic families, the estate will eventually pass on the basis of male primogeniture to her son Charles, even though Violet is, by birth, the oldest of her five children.
“Through the prism of today,” says her daughter, “male primogeniture looks incredibly outdated and backward-looking, but it is there to sustain and maintain these places.” A woman, though, especially with a business degree behind her, could surely do just as good a job of it?
“It does get a bit complicated when you include the female line. Surnames are lost and all that kind of thing.”
Manners was, until recently, dating Old Etonian banker, Ted Morrison, but currently has no plans to marry, she says. “For me, the old tradition of taking your husband’s surname still rings true. I have enormous respect for tradition, which is probably why I am standing in this election.”
Tradition, she believes, is something the National Trust has been guilty of neglecting of late in favour of wokeness. In an online interview, which she released alongside the social media announcement of her candidacy for a council seat, she spoke of the charity as holding “a special place in my heart”.
But, she added, spelling out her platform, the trust’s commitment to its founding values had “wavered”.
She wants to see it become more “brave and brazen” as the leading custodian of Britain’s past. “What I am trying to get across is that the Trust has mistakenly placed a lot of effort on wading into political debate, when actually its main role as steward of all its properties is to provide education, particularly for the younger generation. It has hyper-politicised itself.”
A serious charge, but what she has in her sights is the continuing fall-out from that controversial September 2020 report on slavery. It highlighted 93 of the trust’s properties with such links, including Clandon Park, an 18th-century Palladian mansion near Guildford in Surrey, which in 2015 was left as a shell after a devastating fire.
The trust initially publicly committed itself to restoring some of the principal rooms with the estimated £65 million it received as a pay-out from insurers. But in 2022 – around the same time that Clandon was included in the list of properties with connections to the slave trade – a very different plan emerged.
“It could have been an exciting opportunity for the trust to work with a new wave of regional and rural traditional craftsmen to reimagine the incredible plasterwork. Instead they now want to put a glass ceiling over the top of the empty shell, and install staircases so people can look down on the ruins.”
It is a strategy she finds “deeply depressing. No-one wants to go and see a pile of embers. It is completely off-kilter.”
If she was on the council, might she be able to influence such plans? “I’d love to raise them. You have to be at the table and part of the conversation to show another angle.”
‘There is a lot of me that doesn’t conform with the perceived idea of me’ Credit : Heathcliff O'Malley
Some of Manners’ concerns sound very similar to those of the pressure group, Restore Trust, a forum set up in 2022 for supporters of the organisation who accuse its management of falling into “modish, diverse ideologies”. One of its main campaigns is around Clandon, and its website advertises its support for Manners’ candidacy for the council, as well as that of Lord Sumption and the journalist Andrew Gimson, the biographer of Boris Johnson.
Is there a connection between Manners and Restore? “I’m just myself,” she insists. “There are a lot of things that Restore Trust say that I share, but I am not linked with them in the slightest.”
Some of her supporters, she concedes, are drawn from the ranks of those who are questioning the current direction of the National Trust, such as this paper’s columnist and former editor, Charles Moore. “But I think I am the youngest of the 29 candidates standing for election and I see myself as the young blood, offering a rallying call for that younger demographic of National Trust members.”
At the moment, only around 65,000 of the trust’s members bother to vote for council members. Manners would like to see much more engagement.
The trust’s nominations’ committee, however, appears to be unimpressed by her candidacy. Each year it interviews those standing for the council to pick out those it might like to endorse – and overlooks those it doesn’t like the look of.
You might think that her “lived experience” of growing up in a major stately home – not something many council members can boast – might make her a useful asset to the charity. But evidently not. Does she regard her background as a bonus?
“There is a lot of me that doesn’t conform with the perceived idea of me, or someone like me, from my background. My mum was always determined in school holidays to send us to work either in the kitchen, the tea shop, the ticket office or the ice-cream stand.”
They were not paid. “At the age of 12, I’d be chatting up tables in the restaurant hoping they’d wing me a tip. But those conversations have given me a really good perspective on why people visit these places.”
‘Can I make a small confession? I’ve only ever watched two episodes of Downton’ Credit : Heathcliff O'Malley
And she is already putting that insider knowledge to good effect by channelling it into the successful podcast, The Duchess, which she launched in February 2021 with herself as producer and her mother as presenter, attracting 1.5 million listeners. It is now in its fifth series.
The idea, she recalls, came to her when she was studying in the US and found herself feeling lonely – “they call Los Angeles the city of lost angels” – and missing home and everything that went with it, including the sense of history that Belvoir exudes. Her business antennae had also picked up how fascinated Americans were with the National Trust and British stately homes.
“So when I got back, I persuaded Mum to do a podcast with me”. It features the real-life Duchess going round in each hour-long episode talking to other chatelaines of stately homes. The female angle is, she says, key to its success.
“More often than not it has been the women of these houses who have informed so much of the architecture and the art in them over the centuries. While their husbands were away at war, they were the ones working with the architects and artists.”
Such has been the response – 60 per cent of The Duchess’s listeners are in the States – that there have now been two podcast specials, the first set solely in Belvoir and including Manners reminiscing with her mother about growing up there, and the most recent paying a visit to the Countess of Derby, an old flame of Prince Andrew, at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool, which also has its own safari park.
It has even spawned a spin-off in association with the high end travel firm Abercrombie & Kent that sees overseas visitors book into some of the stately homes featured in the episodes of the podcast where they stay as the guests of the lady of the house. Heritage, Manners points out, “is now nine per cent of the UK’s GDP. In my view it’s paramount that we use it – particularly given the post-Brexit scenario we find ourselves in – as a honeypot.”
But it is not just overseas visitors who are keen to learn more about British history. She reports a 27 per cent upswing in home-grown tourists visiting what she calls “heritage sites” in the past few years. “It is the phenomenon of doorstep discovery, of seeking out places that we had taken for granted for too long. And that has sustained itself. It is a great positive that came out of Covid.”
Has the popularity of Downton Abbey (Vanity Fair described Violet and her siblings as the real-life Crawley sisters), and The Crown (some of which was filmed at Belvoir) on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to this boom? She blushes. “Can I make a small confession? I’ve only ever watched two episodes of Downton so I can’t really comment. I really should just watch it.”
Despite Violet being the oldest sibling, Belvoir Estate will be passed to her brother Charles on the basis of male primogeniture Credit : Lorne Campbell / Guzelian
She is equally coy about her next business venture, again building on the success of The Duchess, and due to be launched at the start of 2024. “I’m fundraising for it right now, so I really don’t want to say too much about it, but it will be a platform for heritage”. What with this new project, and the series of short films she has produced and presented for the Royal Countryside Fund, the King’s charity that supports family farms and rural communities, she will soon be giving Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, the creator of Downton, a run for his money, and she is an aristocrat by birth, whereas his is a life peerage.
If she does get elected to the National Trust council, she may even struggle to fit everything in. Is her mother backing her candidacy? “She is really proud, whether I get on or not, but she forgot to renew her membership during Covid, so she can’t vote for me. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
Though she is determinedly making her own life and career in London, Manners still regularly heads back home to Belvoir where her parents – who separated in 2012 and now have new partners – continue to live side-by-side. “It is totally normal to me now, though I get why it is alien to other people. My mum now spends a lot of time in the cottage on the estate, and my dad in the main house, but if I’m up at the weekend I’ll have lunch with both of them.”
She has talked a lot about her mother as an inspiration, I notice, but very little of her father. “Dad is a pillar of stability in all of our lives. I get my traditional leanings from him, while Mum is the moderniser in me. And he is, without a shadow of doubt, the most well-versed person on history I’ve ever met.”
But her big inspiration, she says, when it comes to standing for election with the National Trust, is Octavia Hill, one of the organisation’s founders in 1893.
“I am in awe of its inception and especially something she said – that we all need space and we all need beauty. That for me stands ever more true today and why this politicising of the National Trust has to stop.”
Related Topics- National Trust,
- Downton Abbey
‘Can I make a small confession? I’ve only ever watched two episodes of Downton’ Credit : Heathcliff O'Malley
The lasso acts as a metaphorical extension of the phantom's influence over her, drawing her deeper into his grasp. However, the magical lasso is not just a tool of control for the phantom; it is also a symbol of his own insecurities and vulnerabilities. Behind the mask of power and domination, the phantom is a tortured soul longing for acceptance and love. The lasso represents his desperate attempt to hold onto the one thing he desires most, knowing that he can never truly possess it. Throughout the musical, the phantom's use of the magical lasso evolves as the story progresses. It becomes increasingly entwined with the themes of love, sacrifice, and redemption. Ultimately, the lasso serves as a catalyst for the phantom's transformation, allowing him to confront the consequences of his actions and find redemption in the face of his own darkness. In conclusion, the phantom's magical lasso in "The Phantom of the Opera" is a powerful symbol that represents his control, manipulation, and longing for love. It adds an element of mystery and intrigue to the story, captivating audiences as they witness the phantom's journey of self-discovery and redemption. The lasso, in all its magical allure, enhances the depth and complexity of the iconic character and contributes to the enduring success of this beloved musical..
Reviews for "The Undying Love: How the Phantom of the Opera's Lasso Binds the Characters Together"
1. Emma Peters - 2 stars
I was really excited to see "The Phantom of the Opera: Magical Lasso" as I am a big fan of the original Broadway production. However, I was greatly disappointed. The storyline seemed disjointed, and the added element of a magical lasso felt forced and out of place. The performances were lackluster, lacking the passion and depth I expected. Overall, it seemed like a cheap attempt to capitalize on the success of the original show, and it fell flat.
2. John Thompson - 1 star
"The Phantom of the Opera: Magical Lasso" was an absolute trainwreck. The plot was barely comprehensible, jumping from one scene to another without any logic or coherence. The addition of a magical lasso felt like a poor attempt to inject some excitement into a lackluster production. The performances were subpar, with the actors seeming disinterested and disconnected from their characters. I strongly advise against wasting your time and money on this disappointing show.
3. Lisa Johnson - 2 stars
As a huge fan of "The Phantom of the Opera," I had high hopes for "Magical Lasso." Unfortunately, it failed to meet expectations. The storyline felt contrived and lacked the depth and complexity of the original. The added magical element only served to distract from the already weak plot. While the sets and costumes were visually appealing, they couldn't make up for the lackluster performances and overall disappointment of the show. I would recommend sticking to the original version of "The Phantom of the Opera" rather than wasting your time on this mediocre adaptation.