Appointing Daniel Kramer as artistic director of English National Opera feels like the last gasp for a company drowning in a sea of troubles. Since January last year, it has had a chairman resign, an executive director resign, an artistic director resign and, most recently, a music director resign. The heartache, the publicly played-out anger, the threat of strikes, the abrupt departures – it all feels familiar, because a prequel to this disaster movie played out around 15 years ago. Some think that ENO has long been starved of the resources it needs; others are losing patience with ENO’s seeming inability to make things work, particularly when it receives, relative to most British arts organisations, a great deal of public money (£12.7m a year even, after a recent £5m cut). Then there is the niggling impression that, amid patchy audience figures, ENO has lost a sense of artistic purpose – despite a brilliant chorus and orchestra. The situation is painful, complex and seemingly intractable, and into this lion’s den, Kramer has willingly walked.
The 39-year-old American stage director and I have arranged to meet a couple of times during rehearsals for Tristan and Isolde, his production of which opens at the London Coliseum, ENO’s theatre, on 9 June. It is only his third for the company. His debut was in 2008 with a production of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, and in 2009 he directed a dark Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, tinged with references to the Josef Fritzl case. Perhaps the shadows of Wagner’s most blackly brilliant work are affecting his mood but, during our first encounter, at the company’s north London rehearsal base – his first interview since his appointment – he is passionate, funny and disarmingly candid, barely pausing for breath as he plunges into an account of his life.
He was born and raised on a sheep farm in a small town in Ohio, he tells me, where he was the chubby kid, not much into sport, something of an outsider. (Later, he says that his aesthetic owes a lot to that farm. “My stuff is dirty. Messy-dirty, messy-dirty. I pitched manure a lot when I was little.”) When a travelling company brought a version of the opera Hansel and Gretel to his school, he was smitten with the illusion of theatre: “I’ll never forget seeing a soprano – as I suppose she was – bending down to pick imaginary flowers.” The obsession continued when his father, a middle-school principal, directed a play. The year after that, when he was nine, his father died, but the relationship with school theatre “the terrible, blocky cartoon sets and people in stadium makeup” remained. Four years after his father’s death, his mother married the undertaker who had embalmed him. Theatre became his escape and salvation; so too dance and music (he learned saxophone and percussion, and sang in choirs).
He studied theatre at Northwestern University in Illinois, where one of his professors took him to see Peter Grimes. “It was the first full opera I’d seen, and I thought: ‘That’s it, that’s what I want to do!’” After graduating, he was asked to assist Simon Callow to run a workshop in the UK; the two fell in love and Kramer stayed in London, beefing up his physical theatre training at schools such as Circus Space. In 2003 he directed Callow and Ann Mitchell in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves, which transferred to the West End; that same year he assisted Trevor Nunn on his production of Hamlet with Ben Whishaw. His reputation as a singular young talent grew as he directed shows such as Woyzeck and Hair at the Gate theatre. When he finally got his hands on Punch and Judy, he was delighted. “I love the theatricality of theatre. I love the paint, and the makeup, and I started to feel damned for that in the theatre world, and then along came the opera, where it’s a case of: ‘Yes please, more, make it huge, and by the way, can you work with 40 people?’”
Life changed for Kramer when his relationship ended. “The day I left Simon Callow I had to support myself for the first time,” he says. At once, there were two big offers – to direct an opera, Prima Donna, by Rufus Wainwright; and to direct a big-bucks musical of King Kong. The former, which premiered at the Manchester international festival in 2010, was not an unqualified critical success, to put it mildly, but King Kong was a “crazy experience” on quite a different scale. “I allowed myself to drift very far from my sense of integrity,” he says. “What happens when you start to do a kajillion-dollar Broadway musical is that [artistic] statement after statement is removed, lest you offend anyone. It’s one little thing after another, so that you don’t really realise it. I remember waking up on the morning of the opening night and feeling completely empty, after five years.” The show, which opened in Australia in 2013 to give it a trial run before New York, received mixed reviews. The producers wanted a raft of changes. Kramer departed the production. It has not yet opened on Broadway.
Kramer was flung into a personal crisis. “I had said no to directing five of the greatest operas in five of the greatest opera houses in the world. I had fucked my career. I woke up in New York and thought: ‘This thing has exploded. I don’t love what I’m doing, I’m cut off from everyone I once loved, I don’t even know if I want to do art any more, it’s too painful.’” Directing had been an extreme business. “I would dream it and give birth to it and rip my soul out for it. I would get too involved, or too angry, or too crazy. There was no moderation or middle ground. I was wild at times.”
Hitting rock bottom, he spent time in various Buddhist centres in New York state; he learned to meditate, he started to teach a little at Brown, he fell in love, and gradually, he says, he recast his artistic life as not so much about “my ego, my art, my Broadway musical, my Olivier award, my Tony award and my image”, but about something deeper: in short, he went looking for an artistic director’s job. And that is the story of how Kramer – after unsuccessful applications to both the Manchester international festival and the Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh – ended up at the helm of one of the most troubled arts organisations in the UK.
After Kramer’s frank narrative, I was left wondering whether his bracing emotional openness was a strength – or a vulnerability that will defeat him, given his lack of experience. “I’m no fool. There were titans up for the job who didn’t remain in the race for various reasons,” he acknowledges when we meet again, this time at the London Coliseum – where I encounter a less discursive, more focused version of the man.
The job spec of artistic director role was framed as subordinate to the chief executive, Cressida Pollock, a reversal of the usual hierarchy. Experienced candidates dropped out, unwilling to play second fiddle to a 34-year-old former management consultant with no track record in the arts. “Yes, I haven’t run an opera house, she hasn’t run an opera house,” he says bullishly. “Can that not be the most exciting thing about it, that we are trying to figure out how to move forward? And that we are trying to figure out how the Coliseum can become London’s most diverse and exciting arts venue? It’s a really big cut, £5m. A fundamental shift had to happen. Bless Cressida, she’s leading with a torch, with a thousand guns aimed at her.”
The model that ENO is now working with sees the chorus no longer full-time, but working nine months out of 12. It was over this move that the former music director, Mark Wigglesworth, resigned in March after barely six months in post. It also sees the main-stage productions reduced from 16 to around 10, and instead, smaller productions created in partnership with different venues while the Coliseum is rented out for part of the year.
For some, ENO has had its heart ripped out. For Kramer, it is is a blank canvas. “I walked into a situation where sadly the music director was gone, the business model was changed, it was all done deals. I had a model in front of me of eight to 10 main-stage shows and six shows outside. If you just walk into the building, that’s not the worst scenario on earth. It’s pretty amazing.” He wants to add in concerts on Sunday evenings – everyone from Bryn Terfel to Björk. He’s determined to have a main-stage premiere each year. Among composers, Iain Bell, who has recently premiered his opera In Parenthesis in Wales, is “top of his list”, and he admires Jocelyn Pook and Charlotte Bray, but he has not been in a position to see important recent stage work by composers such as Phil Venables, Matt Rogers and Francisco Coll. It’s a fair bet that one of his early premieres will be The Invisible Man, by American composer Adam Guettel, which he is already due to direct in Houston.
For the rest of it, the heart of the work will be well-known operas (Butterflies, Bohèmes, Turandots) that he hopes can fill the Coliseum, which is, with nearly 2,500 seats, the largest theatre in London. “Then I would say that the sixth night of the week should be a Pelléas and Mélisande, or a great Janáček, or a Birtwistle, that those other packed-out nights pay for, and on the seventh night we should be doing something that blows everyone’s ears out of the window.” That’s his once-a-month concert night. He wants to do an operetta a year. “ENO can do that pitter-patter comedy better than anyone. Someone who loves Legally Blonde can have a blast at Pirates of Penzance, too.” And then, in the outside work: smaller versions of classics; chamber works; intriguing new directors. Working with smaller London theatres such as the Tricycle, Wilton’s music hall, community centres. Trying to get some of the work to reflect the diversity of the city it is being performed in. He wants, for example, to build a community choir to perform in a production of Purcell’s King Arthur down the line. The overall feel? “There’s a rawness and readiness and a roughness that ENO can offer that is so different from the polished Royal Opera,” he says. “Our chorus will do anything: they are ferocious acting-singing animals. They are amazing. They are the defining feature of my aesthetic. They will go the extra mile. They’ll endanger the beauty of the sound for the truth of the acting.” For Kramer, it’s all about the drama, the storytelling.
He is full of ambition and energy, and, with a great deal of support from colleagues and a board restocked with experienced hands from the cultural world, it feels like a plan that could work. David Lan, the artistic director of the Young Vic theatre, has known Kramer some time: “He’s super-talented, he’s full of stamina, energy, resource and commitment and has a very good brain – and he’s desperate for a big job,” Lan says.
Kramer has the advantage of loving fundraising – a job that many artistic directors regard as a necessary evil at best. “It’s one of those things I can just do in my Americanness,” he says. He’s perfectly happy being at a do and saying, “People, I need £70,000 before we all leave this room!” The most immediate problem is the lack of a music director. Kramer says he has requested a meeting with Wigglesworth, who is back in the building conducting Janáček’s Jenůfa, but “I don’t get the sense that I’m the person who is going to be able to mend that rift. I am doing my best.” Realistically, the hunt for a replacement is on. His ideal? “She or he would be very good with the classics, and would would have an adventurous spirit. He or she would be bitten by the spirit of music drama. And he or she has to be up for the unknown waters of the next three years.”
Kramer’s “dream and ambition”, he says, is to get ENO back into a place where he can get “a fulltime chorus working again”. There will be no easy fixes, though. In his words: “It’s not microwave popcorn.” Lan says he thinks it will be a 10-year task to nurse the place back to full health. One old ENO hand told me that the mood in the company was bleak: “It’s pretty broken. A trauma scene.” But, he added: “Daniel’s great.” Perhaps Kramer’s sojourn amid the dark places of the soul will be precisely the experience that’s needed to lead the company back to the light. “I know that I have something to offer this organisation. I know that I have the maps,” he says. It will be a long and arduous journey, and many before him have fallen.
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