Storm-tossed and besieged, English National Opera is hoping for rescue next month from a band of Cornish pirates. Film director Mike Leigh is to bring his first opera, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, to the stage of London’s Coliseum in three weeks amid fervent prayers that his production can repeat the commercial success of Jonathan Miller’s 1986 version of The Mikado, a show still regularly revived.
The opera company, which has built its reputation on English-language productions of classic operas and on daring new commissions, is in financial peril this year after the loss of its chairman, Martyn Rose, and executive director Henriette Götz, and the Arts Council of England’s shock decision two months ago to strip the organisation of its assured regular grant and put it into a “special funding arrangement”.
Artistic director John Berry is far from the first ENO captain to face the prospect of budgetary collapse – it has always been next to impossible to balance the costs of the huge auditorium with the funding requirement to produce risk-taking, accessibly priced work. But after a decade in the job, Berry must now consider the real threat that the organisation could lose all its grant.
On Wednesday, he is to announce a new season of work in response to his upmarket rivals at the Royal Opera House. Covent Garden has made incursions on to ENO’s territory with a bold range of new work and a recent English-language production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Last week it revealed further plans for work in English, including a new translation of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre on the other side of the Thames. The next season at the Opera House will also open with a promenade production of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, with students’ standing tickets available for £10. Kasper Holten, director of opera at Covent Garden, is clearly challenging ENO’s claim to be “the people’s opera company”.
ENO began its fightback last week by underlining its own controversial, contemporary credentials with a new opera set in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Between Worlds, by English composer Tansy Davies, which depicts six people trapped after the planes hit, opened to critical acclaim at the Barbican.
And 10 days ago, Berry and his new chief executive, Cressida Pollock, unveiled a brave building scheme to open up the front of the historic theatre. The £1.2m redesign, funded by a restaurant chain, would allow pedestrians to see into the foyer and a new cafe area, which would create a public life for the venue during the daytime, with greater access to live rehearsals. “This will not transform our finances totally, but there’s no question there’s tremendous potential there from a commercial point of view,” Berry said.
When Rose left the Coliseum in January, a leaked letter showed that he viewed Berry as “the problem, not the solution”, but the artistic director won support from his board and has earned critical plaudits for many productions.
His fans argue he is doing exactly what he should be – taking artistic risks that often pay off. He has persuaded a series of film directors to create operas, from the late Anthony Minghella’s highly successful production of Madam Butterfly in 2005, to further debuts from Mike Figgis and Terry Gilliam. Along with a few flops, he has scored key hits and ENO took two Oliviers last week when director Richard Jones received the prize for “outstanding achievement in opera” and his production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg was judged best new opera.
In The Pirates of Penzance, Leigh is creating a traditional, Victorian staging of the popular 1879 opera, with the intention of letting it breathe. The director’s initial suggestion to the ENO of setting it on a spaceship in the 29th century was a joke, he has reassured fans. “I don’t want to import any extraneous camp buffoonery. And it ain’t Chekhov either. These characters are puppets – in the proper sense.”
Leigh’s love of G&S was evident in his 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, but tackling a much-loved stage work will be “a big departure”, Berry admits. “This is the first time he’s done a project where he’s not creating an original story and improvising with a group of actors he’s worked with for over 20 years,” he said. In the famous Pirates of Penzance lyrics, the “modern” Major-General Stanley claims: “I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,” but it will take more than this to balance the books.
Filling the 2,359-seat auditorium and paying for the scenery to be stored in Kent each night, owing to lack of space, has proved an insoluble sum so far.