Thought bubble: "I can't believe I'm getting away with this."

Ian McEwan is branching out. Not content with receiving innumerable plaudits for his novels, he has turned his attention to the libretto. For You, written with the composer Michael Berkeley, was commissioned by Music Theatre Wales, and tells the story of a womanising conductor, who humiliates young female performers before seducing them and ignores his longsuffering wife. (Sounds a bit like Jilly Cooper’s maniacal maestro Rannaldini to me.) In an interview with The Times, Mc Ewan cites his irritation with terrible opera plots, “the disjunction between the sublime quality of the music and the silliness, often, of the drama”, and claims that one of his priorities is realism. With that in mind, he demanded that the stage production include subtitles, so that none of the intricacies of the narrative are lost in performance. This may not have been enough for the critics: reviews so far have been hesitant about McEwan’s dialogue or unconvinced by the relationship between score and script. It seems unlikely that this will be his last orchestral venture, however — he’s been heard speculating about musicals…