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Can ENO get it right?

Opera, to stay vital, needs 'the right to fail'. However, the Arts Council's current short-termism doesn't bode well for English National Opera, says Tom Sutcliffe

Friday 25 October 2002 00:00 BST
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The reopening of English National Opera with The Barber of Seville last night was a reminder that some problems do not just go away. For Martin Smith, the investment banker who is chair of the ENO board, Nicholas Payne's sacking as general director of the company last July did not work out quite as expected. I met Martin Smith earlier this month and he was still smarting from the terrible press and public reaction that greeted the board's decision to engage the management consultant Caroline Felton as temporary executive director, at ENO's expense (along with a fresh raft of consultants). The board had agreed to leave all commenting on the Payne departure to the chair. But then Smith didn't answer calls from journalists and went on holiday for most of August, leaving the company about which he told me he cared so much swinging in the wind.

Martin Smith is not used to making mistakes. Whether having lunch with the journalist Norman Lebrecht and speaking to the public through a column in the London Evening Standard is a good way to repair things, time will tell. It might be more helpful to publish accurate figures about box-office returns and ticket sales and establishment costs, something that our subsidised companies used to do. Instead there is a system of financial Chinese whispers which allows the Arts Council of England, in the shape of Hilary Boulding and Nicola Thorold, to continue to be both judge and jury over the administration and artistic results of all of our very few performing-arts companies.

It was, in effect, the ACE that proposed to strip Nicholas Payne of his financial responsibility because they considered he was not exercising it suitably. Yet no artistic decisions can legitimately be made by a heavily subsidised performing-arts company unless they conform with the ACE's view of financial responsibility – which is why the Arts Council has always had an observer at ENO board meetings. Separating the roles of financial and artistic boss is a recipe for resignation of one or the other. The issue is who takes responsibility. At the Bavarian State Opera, every payment has to be approved by the same civil servant. The intense financial scrutiny to which ENO has been subjected for most of the last decade has involved repeated visitations by expensive accountants – all of which reduces the amount of taxpayers' money actually going into the product the company exists to supply: performances of opera.

So Smith may, to an extent, have been hoist with the ACE's petard – though he clearly lacked confidence in Payne and resented the style of their relationship. Payne has been held by many (not just the ACE) responsible for the fiasco, largely not of his making, of the Royal Opera House closure for rebuilding during his time there as director. The Arts Council was wounded in those ROH wars and, after all, institutions (like individuals) tend to think of themselves first. Payne's closure plans both at the ROH and ENO could not guarantee the financial out-turn in terms of ticket sales and modified establishment costs – though at an ENO board meeting, he proposed three ways of saving up to one and a half million pounds over an 18- month period. The proposal was not discussed.

But the justification for the sacking, according to John Tusa, speaking to me without quite breaking the board's agreement to leave explanations to Martin Smith, was: "If you knew what we knew, you'd see we had no alternative." And that nod and wink relates both to budgets for the closure and renovation periods, and to the past season's downturn in ticket sales (post September 11), which worked out at, for example, a 17 per cent shortfall on a quite modestly budgeted Madam Butterfly revival. Such current trading deficits can easily turn into a financial disaster, especially when performing-arts institutions are expected to keep within, say, 5 per cent of budgeted expectations – something that, as both companies' and financial institutions' current performances show, in the real business world is almost never achieved.

The sums being mentioned of a possible future deficit (£3m or £4m) relate to the renovation closure combined with perceived difficulties in a less favourable economic climate. My guess is that the structural alterations at the Coliseum, incorporating the balcony audience into the whole of the house, will rapidly have a favourable effect on ticket sales. The Royal Opera House audience is far more mixed since the restored house opened. But though ENO balcony sales are of low-price seats, the company has to achieve much higher attendance if it is going to secure its future.

Martin Smith's and the ACE's shake-up will be healthy in various ways. Spending millions on surtitles for all would clearly be

insane, but a more limited scheme (perhaps a hand-held electronic board available in certain seats, perhaps at a small charge) could make sense. Equally, extending the existing number of company contracts to enhance the quality of casting could make economic sense. Smith thinks that the new artistic leadership might be a well-known opera director, somebody whose fame adds value to the post. A search is on for a charismatic talent aged around 40. Candidates, after the Payne experience, will need reassuring that their vision and judgement will be backed by the board.

In the past, the Arts Council used to take the view that the financial consequences of unpredictable events like rail strikes should be funded by the subsidiser. The point of subsidy is to achieve performances of a necessary (ie interesting, worthwhile and artistically responsible) repertoire. In the past, Payne would not have been deemed guilty for the current downturn.

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In the period of rapid inflation (ie the first 50 years since 1945 of British arts subsidy), it was easy to disguise adjustments in subsidy to companies making up for their artistic failures or ticket-sale flops stemming from misreadings of public taste. That is no longer true in an age of deflation. But, if the performing arts are to have a significant future here, the ACE will have to move away from its current short-termism.

The ecology of the performing arts is too unsympathetically regarded by the ACE establishment currently wielding power, whose backgrounds mostly were in the world of television and radio, where vast economies of scale can be enjoyed. The live performing arts, after a disastrous Thatcherite squeeze on their finances during the 1980s and early 1990s, are now subject to a damaging search for financial "responsibility" by the Labour government. The result, evident at the National Theatre and threatening elsewhere, is that the available repertoire is too constrained by populism and tends to ignore the masterpieces of European theatre, let alone a healthy range of risky new English-language work. Perhaps ENO should cancel its planned Ring. But the threat to The Trojans this season was ridiculous.

Without acceptance of box office risk, the future for companies like ENO – let alone the tiny British handful of theatrical reps and opera companies nearer to the grassroots – will be dull. It will also put in contention the fundamental basis of subsidy – the work being undertaken, not who sees it. Performing arts cannot be widely accessible on existing ACE resources, so it matters all the more what companies actually undertake.

If companies are tied down to a safety- first policy, what likelihood is there of a visionary successor to Payne? If every four years, ENO bosses are chucked out, the subsidisers will look like Princess Turandot. The ACE and ENO's board must put the human side of the company's performing role first. What matters is the range and quality of the work. The performing arts must be guaranteed the right to fail to make ends meet under far more circumstances than the ACE is now prepared to concede.

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