The Royal Opera House
(Picture: ES Magazine)Pity the parent of the child who develops an expensive hobby. Football, for example. Ever since Euro 2020, my eight-year-old has been going through school shoes every three weeks. He insists (insists!) that we have Now TV for the Premiership at £30 per month and as a surcharge for Spurs being quite decent these days, we must pay £25 per month for the Champions League on BT Sport. At the time of writing, the only seats available to watch Tottenham live are ‘Informal Dining’ tickets vs Aston Villa — at £599 a pair.
If only he were into something a little less elitist, a little less arcane, a little more accessible. Like opera. You can get change from a tenner for two tickets to the Royal Opera House. Lovely building. World-class performers. Incredible scenes. You even get to sip a beer while watching them. Opera is civilised like that. ‘The only elite thing about opera is how talented the people are who do it,’ says Oliver Leith, 32, the company’s current composer-in-residence at Covent Garden and, I am delighted to hear, an Enfield boy like me, Enfield not traditionally being a hotbed of high culture. ‘Watching the singers rehearse, memorise all the music and movements, emote, understand — it’s Olympic levels of ridiculousness. But that’s the only elite thing I can think of in opera. The people who work in opera are from the greatest array of backgrounds you could imagine.’
