Determining the success of an opera production used to be a straightforward matter: was it good, did it work. What happened on stage was paramount. Those questions remain key, not least to honour the artists taking part. When, as increasingly happens, a spokesperson comes on at the start with the verbal equivalent of a begging bowl, we cannot look away or block our ears. Nor should we. This was the case at Opera North last week, apologetically wrapped into a cast change announcement, before the company’s new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. At this critical point in the UK’s artistic life – a new week, a new cut – that desperate line of the poet Rilke comes to mind: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” For hierarchies, to interpret freely, read local authorities, funding bodies, ministers of state, the government, the prime minister. Silence.
Even Opera North, exemplary in so many ways, awarded “Theatre of Sanctuary” status in 2022 “for going above and beyond to encourage understanding and compassion”, has not escaped the blade. Last autumn it announced restructuring and job losses. Performance numbers are down. No one yet knows what impact English National Opera’s partial relocation from London to Manchester will have. All these issues were constantly in mind during a musically strong, thoughtful but fragmentary production of Dutchman, conducted by Garry Walker, directed by Annabel Arden. The chorus and orchestra were magnificent throughout, as if straining every ounce of their collective energy to show what an opera company, working together, can do.
