How to save ENO – by two directors the ENO board threw out
NewsJohn Berry was artistic director of English National Opera from 2005 to 2015, until a bust-up with a headstrong chairman and with the Arts Council led to his departure. What followed was the decline of the company to its present deathbed state.
Berry, in an essay for Prospect magazine, argues that the Arts Council needs to get better advice on funding from hardened arts professionals rather than relying on deskbound policy wonks.
As for ENO’s future, Berry harks back to a previous blueprint:
‘Dennis Marks (pictured), the late, former general director of the ENO, had a vision in the mid-1990s of building a 1,500-seat lyric house, truly fit for opera, by selling the Coliseum to the commercial sector. The feasibility study received a lukewarm response from his board, the press and ACE, and the idea didn’t take hold. That was a shame at the time—and remains so.
‘After all, it is Marks’s sort of thinking that is required now; not impromptu salami-slicing that neglects to recognise the importance of the ENO and other institutions to the UK creative industries—and, indeed, to the UK—as a whole. A good start would be ACE disentangling itself from central government and becoming an open, modern, transparent organisation with the vision to adapt to the many challenges ahead.’
Read on here.
Another outbreak of common sense. I hope it’s infectious.
John Berry left a trail of financial disaster when he was pushed out of ENO, so with respect, you have to take what he says with a pinch of salt. His artistic aspirations pushed ENO into financial difficulties from which it has never really recovered. As a result of the mess ENO’s grant was cut from over £17 Million to £12 Million and ACE placed it in “special measures”. The Board engaged a totally unsuitable CEO and cut the performance schedule in half. When she left, Stuart Murphy was appointed with results that we now know. ACE did not rate him and so he is leaving but it hasn’t helped as, finally the balloon has gone up.
You’re quite wrong. Berry was accused by the ACE of accumulating a deficit. The accusation proved to be false.
That in inaccurate. Having worked under Berry at the time, he and Loretta overspent by at least 10 million across their tenure. They were bailed out TWICE and hence he was removed by force. Neither of them had respect for budgets their full tenure. Hence he was terminated. He actually curated good art, but with arrogant denial of reality.
If you cannot supply proof, this comment might be considered defamatory.
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
What are you saying? Defamation – you cannot be serious, it’s all out there in the Public Domain.
Another stupid comment from a man who SUNK the building with his 13 million dollar personal debt only 8 years ago, a man who showed NO responsibility for ACE money…. And now he wants to lecture us on building a custom built opera house for a company that has been dying since his wreckless hands took hold of it? 250 Million of public money, most likely, for a new opera house? WAKE UP. Go away, again, Berry. You are not helping the nightmare. You triggered it with your selfish greed.
Nostradamus Norman has form for his breathless admiration for the ludicrous, disastrous Berry, whose skin-crawling face-palming ‘Kismet’ was the true beginning of the end for ENO.
https://slippedisc.com/2015/01/enos-choice-sack-him-or-suck-it/
‘John Berry is ENO’s ideas bank. Without him, the Coliseum is just an expensive piece of real estate. Contrary to most boardroom leaks, I expect him to survive. The Arts Council, whose conduct through the past year has been pusillanimous, will pay up regardless. They cannot be seen to be organising a putsch at a client institution.
Our money’s on John Berry for the immediate future.’
30 Jan 2015. Berry was defenestrated less than six months later.
I must say that I am a fan of John Berry. When I worked for him at ENO – four times! – I found him constantly supportive and always using his bigger-than-life personality to try and pull the company into the modern world. Successes outweighed missteps and I, as a foreigner but intimately involved in the courses of several companies in the USA, always admired his constant brainstorming. He and the late, great John McMurray and Ed Gardner had a good thing going and I was proud to be associated with them and ENO. One of my close friends and mentors, Colin Graham, only spoke glowingly of the company and when I debuted there I had him on my shoulder.
Is there an existing 1,500-seat (or 1,200-seat or 1,000-seat) theater outside of London that might be suitable? Hard to imagine that there isn’t …
ENO needs to stay in London as a major opera house and an alternative to ROH that most of us can never afford.
How much can you pay for a ticket?
Because there are plenty under £50 in Covent Garden even after members hoard most of them.
Reading that article you would think that the solution to all arts woes is to throw money at them and that this money grows on trees.
It’s an attitude problem which sees the arts as detached and entitled and sooner or later it will lead to trouble.
If I remember correctly, Dennis wanted to move the company to a new purpose-built theatre on the Potter’s Field site near Tower Bridge. Renovating the Coliseum, especially the backstage area, would be very costly and was not considered a responsible use of public funds. Dennis was absolutely convinced that moving the company away from the Coliseum was the only way to secure the future of ENO but the Board did not subscribe to his vision.
ENO had been given the Coliseum about 4 years previously thanks to David Mellor, accompanied by fanfares and expressions of profound and then-sincere gratitude. Marks’ time- and money-wasting obsession with ‘a new theatre’ merely demonstrated his blithe detachment from reality. There was never the slightest possibility that the Arts Council or politicians would permit the company to spurn its freshly-donated home in the heart of Theatreland, let alone fund an imaginary new one. Marks greatly preferred building castles in the air to looking after and defending the one he lived in.
Complete nonsense! You obviously haven’t read the feasibility study.
I read both the feasibility study and the audience research. The former, written by ‘consultants’ who knew how to please their client, told Marks what he wanted to hear. The latter proved the utter folly of his fantasies.
I have no idea who you are but I was working at ENO during the nineties as Director of Artistic Administration & Dramaturgy and in that capacity closely involved in the feasibility study. Your remarks about pleasing consultants who told Dennis what he wanted to hear is simply ridiculous and not true.
Sure about that?
Michael White, writing in the ‘Independent’ , 26/01/97 :
‘Incidentally, memories of Della Jones’s diction give the lie to one of the many spurious reasons ENO is advancing for its relocation plans: namely that the current auditorium is too big for singers. To abandon the best theatre-site in Britain on grounds like that is madness; but then lunacy has been the hallmark of this whole affair, starting with the £1.4m paid to accountants KPMG to produce the “feasibility study” which recommends the move. I don’t know how KPMG justifies its fee, but I know that the KPMG researcher I agreed to brief (for no fee at all) appeared to have zero understanding of the subject and spent two hours asking me risibly basic questions. If this was typical of the way the “study” was compiled, it hardly commends its conclusions.’
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/and-for-this-they-want-a-new-theatre-1285218.html
Sir/Madam, I am discontinuing the conversation as I am not prepared to argue with someone who is cowardly hiding behind a mask of anonymity.