Better late than never? More than a year after Arts Council England made its swingeing and unwarranted cuts to opera funding, which have been the focus of sustained criticism, it has finally produced a 115-page document which reads like a retrospective attempt to justify its draconian approach. It has the flavour of trying to shut the stable door after the horses have long since disappeared into the night.
Needless to say, it is all the work of external consultants; the three qualified members of the reference group that ACE appointed to the report (Opera Australia’s Fiona Allan, veteran arts bureaucrat Anthony Blackstock and former TV arts executive Jan Younghusband) are now oddly “not responsible for any of its contents”.
This document does not aim to present a new strategy for opera and music theatre: it is essentially a collection of data, which clearly should have been collected before any funding decisions were made. It also utterly fails to demonstrate that committed audiences for opera and music theatre have fallen off a cliff in a way that might justify the level of funding changes.
The report is dripping with condescension towards the sector, full of patronising language about the “prevalence of classical music paradigms in opera and music theatre”, attributing conventional lazy thinking to those actually working in the sector, with passing remarks about the narrow-mindedness of critics who are “often quite conservative in their tastes, often in their roles for a long time, and almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”.
It’s as if our companies had never begun to address issues of diversity, sustainability, talent development, the changing repertory and acute economic challenge. Starting from the unarguable position that opera “is an expensive art-form”, the report notes with a severely critical tone that “the 25 most frequently performed operas are all over 100 years old”. I wonder if the RSC is similarly criticised for the fact that its most frequently performed plays are by Shakespeare, who is over 400 years old?
As well as “the relative narrowness of the mainstream repertoire”, which has actually broadened significantly in recent decades, it cites as a chilling challenge to the sector “the degree to which existing repertoire could be more openly interpreted and explored”. It admits there may be “limited appetite from critics and audiences familiar with opera and musical theatre for more significant re-interpretations of mainstream repertoire which might more substantially deviate from or play with a composer’s original vision and score”, but the implication is that those people scarcely matter. Whether or not we are ready to rewrite the classics to suit cancel culture, the fact that all these operas more than 100 years old are in fact reinterpreted and rethought in almost every new production is passed over.
The report manages to minimise the companies’ commitment to developing new work (as an example, my three highlights of last year’s opera productions were all of new operas by Kaija Saariaho, Jonathan Dove and George Benjamin). The ways in which the companies have broadened their approach to collaborate with other art forms (such as Opera North’s collaboration between Monteverdi and South Asian music in Orpheus) are evidence of a growing trend.
But such initiatives do not fit easily into the mantra of the Arts Council’s woolly overall Let’s Create strategy (focusing on grass-roots participation), its framework for funding over the coming years, and its Dynamism Investment Principle which argues for a more productive use of subsidy by “becoming more entrepreneurial, sharing services and exploring mergers”. Our culture is a wide, diverse and broad church, and not everything that should be supported fits neatly into these rigid boxes.
Despite all this, the report has gathered a great deal of useful information from the sector about developments in the areas of education, outreach, talent development and community-building, though arguably too little about health and wellbeing and the contribution to the environment and place-making. It charts the daunting challenges for the future as a result of rising costs, post-Covid recovery, Brexit, added to now by huge local authority cutbacks. But the continuing snide assumption of this analysis is that it is somehow all the sector’s fault for not thinking more radically.
“Many of the larger organisations have their genesis in the post-war period,” it says sniffily. Well, so does the Arts Council. There is only a dismissive line about quality, claiming no one knows what it means, with a footnote making the grim proposal that we need a new study to understand it. So there are no judgements as to excellence of performance or staging. There has been no work at all with audiences to assess their reaction to the work that is offered around the country: but they recognise quality when they see and hear it.
The financial analysis is the most valuable part of the review, and highlights that the overall reduction in ACE funding of opera and music theatre has in total been only eight per cent between 2015/2016 and 2023/24. Yes, the sector should collaborate more to work on effective new business models, and there should be more learning by the big companies from the economical structures of the smaller ones. But the unarguable fact is that the innovations suggested by the analysis which the companies wish to pursue will cost money, as does increased touring around the country. That leads the report to the threatening conclusion that these challenges “may limit ambitions” in the sector, which is just code for justifying reduced funding in the future.
Then there is the categorical statement: “The opera and music theatre sector is not an ecology”. Yet an ecology is exactly what has existed in this sector and enabled it to flourish. The ecology of arts funding was sustained in the past by the Arts Council keeping an alert balance between supply and demand, working with those in the sector to develop the art form. It was often tense, not always right, but it served audiences. Now it is the Arts Council itself that has at a stroke destroyed this ecology by withdrawing touring funding from Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne, not wanting to understand the impact on the companies, depriving venues and audiences around the country of provision – as well as the attempted 100 per cent cut to English National Opera that has since been partly restored.
To its credit, this report does not disguise the gap between what the Arts Council wants to achieve and the results of the current mismanaged funding round. Its support of emerging younger companies has been admirable, while ACE arguments have helped the good news on tax credits that featured in last week’s budget. But gone are the days when the Arts Council would be an advocate for the sector, arguing for it at every level, actively and collaboratively working with it to achieve change.
This too-late-in-the-day report comes at a very difficult time for ACE, which has faced criticism not only for its funding decisions but for its instructions to companies and individuals to avoid “political and activist” comment, which had to be redrawn in the face of sustained opposition. It is now to be the subject of a major review by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, reportedly to be carried out by Mary Archer. It has never been easy to hold responsibility for the funding decisions around culture, and this is not the first time that the Arts Council has faced criticism. But for it to survive, there needs to be a broad consensus of trust in the organisation. The crude errors in its recent decisions and performance have eroded that trust, and reading this report confirms that it has lost its way.