The new culture secretary Lisa Nandy was making encouraging noises about arts funding in an interview last week, pledging to get state cash to every community. Her comments appeared two days after my colleague Fiona Maddocks reviewed Northern Ireland Opera’s heroic production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, staged with paltry state funding, in a province that under the last government saw spending on the arts fall to just £5.07 per head. Over the border in the EU-member Republic of Ireland, the figure is £21.68. Clearly, Nandy needs to get cracking.
Switch now to another new production of Eugene Onegin, this time at the Royal Opera House, a body that receives £22.3m annually from Arts Council England (cut from £25.2m in 2023). Northern Ireland triumphed with a homegrown, shoestring show. Strange, then, that the upholstered ROH should stage an Onegin that looks even sparser; indeed, eschews scenery altogether. US director Ted Huffman, making his main stage debut, wants the audience to imagine things that are not physically represented on stage; probably a difficult concept for those who have paid large sums to enjoy a spectacle.
