How I would save ENO from ruin 

As English National Opera fights for survival, Rupert Christiansen explains what he would do to rescue the embattled company 

In 2016, the most urgent issue confronting those who govern the arts is the future of English National Opera. Resolving the problem will test the foundations of post-war cultural policy, by questioning whether public revenue should be used to subsidise art forms of minority interest.

ENO is not in short-term crisis, or in one that can be squarely blamed on particular individuals. Although its woes over the past decade can partly be ascribed to a weak and divided board prepared to sanction sticking-plaster fudges and risky over-spending, the fault-lines are ingrained and systemic – over nearly half a century, the company has never been framed by a business model that can robustly balance its books.

Now the point has been reached at which Arts Council England’s patience has snapped: by putting the organisation in “special measures” and withdrawing about 30 per cent of its annual grant, it has given notice that radical change is required. Some loyalist commentators are manning the barricades to defend the current set-up; others have proposed good riddance, even the nuclear option. Neither position seems to me realistic.

A new regime, led by the executive directorship of a young and inexperienced management consultant Cressida Pollock and the chairmanship of medical insurance tycoon Harry Brünjes, is energetically attempting to cobble together a rescue package stitched with more profit from catering, more performances of popular repertory and longer periods of rental to external companies, as well as draconian savings and cuts. 

But all such measures have to some extent been tried already – notably by Pollock’s hard-nosed predecessor Loretta Tomasi – and they will be of no lasting avail until the matter of ENO’s home address at the London Coliseum is resolved.

There is only one good thing that can be said on behalf of this old variety theatre: it gives ENO presence in the heart of the West End. In every other respect, it is a millstone round the company’s neck, a constant drain on its resources and a luxury it cannot afford.

As Susie Gilbert’s excellent history Opera for Everybody explains in detail, it has been pretty much a disaster from the day in August 1968 when the company moved there from the decrepit Sadler’s Wells. 

At that time, the management had been in optimistic, expansionist mood, further fuelled by early triumphs such as the Ring cycle conducted by Reginald Goodall, the musical direction of Charles Mackerras and stellar performances by Janet Baker, Valerie Masterson and Josephine Barstow.

Yet the move was always regarded as a pitstop, given the hope that one day the government would build the company a bespoke opera house on the South Bank. This would never materialise, and meanwhile the Coliseum quickly proved unviable: too big to fill (it seats 2,350, more than the Royal Opera House), acoustically problematic, lacking in office, rehearsal and storage space and cursed with inefficient, primitive and verminous backstage facilities.

And so it has continued, despite a Heritage Lottery scheme to renovate the gilded Edwardian splendours of its foyers and auditorium. The opera here may often have been magnificent – brilliant, scandalous, adventurous, influential – but dogged by threats of strikes and insolvency, the organisation behind it was sustained only by sweeping all the problems under the accountant’s carpet, waiting for the Arts Council’s dustpan.

ENO currently refuses – reprehensibly for a quasi-public institution – to release detailed accounts or audience figures, but they are widely believed to be shockingly bad, despite a substantial retrenchment in the number of loss-making performances and rigorous economies in some areas.

It would be legally difficult to sell the Coliseum outright, since the freehold was inalienably bought for the nation on its behalf in 1992. But it can be rented out, and perhaps a more permanent lease to a hungry musical impresario such as Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful or Delfont Mackintosh could be arranged, possibly in exchange for another of their more commodious West End theatres.  

Whether this is possible or not, ENO must now downsize, dropping its “world-class” pretensions and foregoing extravagant productions such as this autumn’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which require massive numbers of extras, uncompensated by higher ticket sales.

It should also reinvent itself as a poor opera company – by which I mean one that is light on its feet, unencumbered by vast production budgets and hordes of backroom personnel. It should look to its younger offshoot Opera North rather than to Covent Garden or the Met, lowering its ambitions in terms of scale but not of quality or imagination.

Directors who can provide durable productions of perennial crowd-pleasers such as Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly and Jonathan Miller’s The Mikado should be favoured over shock-jocks whose concepts wither after they’ve ephemerally hit the headlines. The austere example of Britten’s English Opera Group or Music Theatre Wales should be followed in staging new and chamber opera without folderol.

All this would imply a smaller and more flexible establishment than at present, with an inevitable degree of redundancy. My belief is that “picking up” a freelance orchestra and chorus ad hoc would be a retrograde step, but it is true that the summer festivals do this with usually satisfactory results.

What is the point of English National Opera? Its mission was originally implied by those two adjectives in its name, but since it was re-christened in 1974 after 30 years as Sadler’s Wells Opera, there have been several game-changers. 

The first of these is the innovation of surtitles, which reduces the case for ENO’s singing virtually everything in English translation (though, illogically, it has occasionally sung in Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Ancient Egyptian). Audiences would largely welcome a more flexible policy on this front: Norma will doubtless sound daftly fustian when it is sung in English next month.

The honorific of “National” no longer means anything here, since it is now decades since ENO performed anywhere outside central London. Quitting the Coliseum for longer periods would at least allow the company to become more peripatetic within the M25 without excessively interfering with the touring patterns of Glyndebourne, WNO, Opera North and ETO.

At the same time, it would be good to see the company more focused on home-grown talent – in recent years, too many singers, conductors and operas have been needlessly imported from the US, with a corresponding failure to nurture younger native talents.

Finally, there is the question of demand. It has never made sense for London to have two large opera houses, the Coliseum and Covent Garden, competing back-to-back on the same territory: no other city in the world duplicates this folly, and the resulting glut of seats does nobody any favours.  

Beyond any decision about ENO, the even larger question for the cash-strapped ACE is this: now that HD broadcasts have mopped up so much of the old “live” opera audience – at minimal cost to the public purse – what justification is there for spending around 15 per cent of its annual grant on an art form that, brutally speaking, primarily engages only a narrowly middle-class, middle-aged Caucasian constituency?