The ENO is based at the London Coliseum in the West End (Ian West/PA)
(Picture: PA Archive)The English National Opera is a strange beast. On one level, it is the second opera house to glitzy Covent Garden, where the musical cognoscenti, wealthy, and government ministers hover to ensure a credible mix of high culture and intentions in (a few) cheap seats. English National Opera has more overtly democratic credentials — opera sung in English has been its USP — a hangover from the days when surtitling technology was basic and audiences less accustomed to relishing Netflix foreign drama with translations.
As long as I have attended and written about the grand old Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane, the “Coli” has been both the glory and curse of the ENO: so huge as to be unfillable for novel works and latterly reliant on risky deals with musicals, which often don’t work well in a space that is better for opera and sporadic seasons of ballet.
Funding squeezes have long been at its throat and now threaten strangulation. A defence by the Arts Council chief executive Darren Henley notes that the main arts funding body “declined to offer ENO a place in its next national portfolio of funded organisations. Instead, we proposed a package for it to relocate and reimagine itself outside London.”
The problem is that it has “declined” to keep funding ENO from next year, but a sum of £17 million to go away and reimagine itself is not the answer and the tone of the proposition is glib.
It is one thing to say there is too much concentration of arts in London. That is, however, not addressed by means of a simple cull: diminishing one arts organisation does not lead to its magical rebirth in Manchester or Birmingham. Arts Council England is fuzzily vague on how a re-location might work in the North or Midlands (the vagueness towards “outside London” geography is telling in itself).
Manchester has been briefed as the likely beneficiary, but it is uncertain that it could afford to adopt ENO, even with support. Opera North, based in Leeds, does not fancy the competition, which might leave Birmingham, hungry for more cultural assets — but again, on what terms?
The neatest idea floating around its board is to seek to shed the financial liability of its “trophy asset” home and relocate. On that scenario, ENO could continue to do limited seasons at the Coliseum for the work which draws audiences big enough to sustain it while more experimental work would be performed in the Sadler’s Wells venues in Islington and (from next year) its new venue in the East End — to the Barbican.
Where the Arts Council does have a point is that ENO needs a much deeper commitment to its reach outside the capital. It might consist of moving the administrative jobs attached (the Channel 4 solution), but it will need an artistic commitment to residencies which would allow it to grow roots in communities and attract benefactors outside the M25. I cannot see a solution which is not in some way a “dual residency” — the cultural equivalent of dual citizenship.
But this is also about avoiding more damage than is necessary, given the centrality of the ENO to the opera and ballet ecology at a time of great stress in the sector. Henley writes that this is all about innovation — “opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet”.
It lands, I’m afraid, with a crashing diminuendo effect in traumatic circumstances for the house’s musicians and technical staff. So does the threadbare defence that the Arts Council is investing very little in touring companies, which are often second-tier versions of productions or limited to a repetitive set of works to put more bottoms on seats.
A solution will also need urgent help from central government.
So Michael Gove, the Levelling-Up Secretary, fond of Wagner, needs to set about some urgent silo-crossing with his Department of Culture colleagues and also accrue advice from the many interested parties in the north, south and in-between.
The prize is re-connecting London to the rest of the country with a new future for the troubled but stubbornly durable ENO. The risk, on the present showing of the arts bureaucracy, is that it is easier to break institutions than it is to remake them. That would be a final act to avoid.
