‘I’ve got to say this straight off the bat,” says the director Adele Thomas. “I was expecting this company, given what they’ve been through, to all have their arms crossed and to just not want to know. And actually, they’ve been so unbelievably welcoming. And that’s been a saving grace whenever we’ve turned around and it’s looked like there’s another bin on fire.”
Thomas is one half of Welsh National Opera’s new leadership team along with Sarah Crabtree, and since starting the job in January they haven’t been short of fires to put out. We first talked in April, days after they had given an impassioned speech at the curtain call of the company’s first night of Britten’s Peter Grimes, with more than 100 performers and staff behind them on stage. Four months of graft later, the planned autumn productions of Puccini’s Tosca and Bernstein’s Candide are on their way, and the 2026-27 season – Thomas and Crabtree’s first as programmers – is in place (details will be announced next March). The funding situation remains bleak, and yet finally there is a sense that, after three years of bad news, the company may be able to look to the future.
