The Arts Council has published its report on the viability of the Royal Opera House’s proposal to convert the Palace Theatre in Manchester into a second permanent home for the Royal Opera and Royal Ballet. You can read in full on the Arts Council website.
Estimates are that the project would cost £100m in terms of capital renovations to the Palace, and that the annual running cost would be £12-15m per annum.
The idea is a fantastically exciting one and would – if successful – revolutionise the way in which the arts are conducted outside on London. Audiences for Opera in Leeds tripled when Opera North was created. Audiences for Ballet in Birmingham more than doubled when BRB arrived. The hope is that ROHM could do even better than this.
There is much debate in the report on the impact on other arts organisations in the North, principally the likely impact on the Lowry which expects to lose £1.5m a year and 50,000 audience members should ROHM go ahead.
Even setting this aside for a moment, and accepting as a premise that the establishment of a permanent home for opera in the city would be a good thing, the question still remains: why the Royal Opera House? Why not plough £15m a year into Opera North or spend £115m creating a home-grown opera company for Manchester? The plan is that most of the management and impetus for ROHM should come locally in any case, so the question remains: what does the Royal Opera House bring to the proposal that any other opera company could not?
Principally, the Royal Opera House provides a brand, one which is synonymous with quality. However, as Charlotte Higgins wrote back in January, it is also a brand which is largely synonymous with a particular iconic building. Does this brand maintain its value when exported to a different building in a different city run by a different artistic team and with a drastically reduced programme? Will the opera-goers of the Second City be so awed by the glossy red programmes and the rampant lion on the front of the building that they will flock there in a way that they would not to a reinvigorated Opera North?
The key to the success for any new opera house will be for its audiences and its communities to adopt it as their own. In this, there is a material risk that the ROH brand could be a liability. Even with the best intentions, the ROHM will struggle to become anything except a junior partner to the ROH (the current plan calls for just 16 performances a year in the new venue; will the current ROH rename itself ROH London?) and local communities are unlikely to warm to an arts organisation which is seen as a colonial outpost of the ‘proper’ arts which are going on in the South East.
The two prime precedents for this project are Opera North and Birmingham Royal Ballet. Both started as off-shoots from London based organisations, the English National Opera and Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet respectively and are now enormously successful organisations in their home cities of Leeds and Birmingham. Can it be a coincidence that both these success stories have cut their ties to their London parents and now run as autonomous organisations in their home cities? Would they have been as widely adopted by local communities had they still been under the control of the Coliseum or Covent Garden?
There are numerous issues to be addressed. There are perhaps even better ways to spend the money. These debates are academic, however, since it is very unlikely anything will happen without the ROH. If there were £115m sitting around waiting for allocation to the cause of arts in the North, then there would be merit in debating whether ROHM or Opera North or BRB or a new Manchester Opera would be the most worthy beneficiary. But in the midst of a recession, the arts will have to fight tooth and nail for this money; and there is nobody better placed to do this than the ROH with their strong track record of providing regional access to the arts, their international reputation, their large-scale organisation and their relationship with the Arts Council.
It may be ROHM or nothing.
