The knives are out but the singing goes on at the opera

Never Mind the Moonby Jeremy Isaacs(Bantam Press, #20)

OPERA, it is said, is where when someone gets stabbed, instead of dying, they keep on singing. That's the way it has long been, front and backstage, at the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden. Courtesy of that revealing fly-on-the-wall television series, it became a popular spectator sport for a while - eavesdropping on the grotesque behaviour of the administrators and artistes behind the scenes. And it was nearly a blood sport at that. Those in the real world outside watched in disbelief that such things actually went on.

Against that bewilderingly bizarre backdrop, the actual "product" - the work that appeared on stage - was frequently sub-standard. Front- of-house prices kept on going up so that, eventually, the corporate sponsoring class and their guests seemed to take over the whole auditorium. Nobody else could afford a seat in the stalls.

The real opera buffs became Friends of Covent Garden and queued in the rain from early in the morning to watch the rehearsals, which remained reasonably affordable. Night after night, the glitterati and their trophy spouses filled the seats, ate their chocolates and whispered throughout the performances. It was all very peculiar. So what was a nice intelligent Glasgow boy like Jeremy Isaacs doing in a place like that?

He tells the tale well. It is a book that the shops should file under, under War Studies rather than Arts or Opera. Incidentally, someone recently confided in me that his wife was Ann Widdecombe not Gillian Widdicombe. Now, there was a nice misunderstanding.

Jeremy Isaacs is a very talented individual, as his distinguished record in the world of television continues to demonstrate. But, as a complete outsider to the world of administering opera and ballet, over his nine years at Covent Garden, he was faced with huge inherited financial problems and an unbelievable backstage bureaucracy.

The critics, not just on the Arts pages, consequently set to work to attack his "elitist" handling of this most elitist of organisations. Farce and fury went hand in acrimonious hand and broke many people on the way. And nobody resigns with more flounce and aplomb than an arts administrator departing in high dudgeon.

This is a tale of management and gross mismanagement worthy of study at every business school and is essential reading for that alone.

In picking my way through this venom-spiced book, I was tempted to skip all the involved bits about who said what to whom, why, when and wherefore, unless I knew the cast. Trouble is, it was the backstage cast that so often held centre stage. Many of them were forever "backing into the limelight". So many of the bit players mentioned here were filling roles that were way above their competence - from the Board down. I knew quite a few of them and they certainly should never have been involved in administering this once great British institution.

The cruel - some would say fully justified - invective directed at the running of Covent Garden by the relevant select committee of the House of Commons under its ascerbic chairman, Gerald Kaufman, was of a quality that might, with benefit, be set to music. "When I go to the Royal Opera House," Kaufman said, "I feel as though I am intruding in a private club which is tolerating my presence with difficulty." He later added: "Yet it's a shambles. It really is a shambles." Even from the evidence this of book, it is difficult to disagree.

In the end, did Jeremy Isaacs revitalise a neanderthal organisation and drive through reforms as he claims? Or did he - as his critics, including his predecessor Sir John Tooley, carp - preside over a series of disgraceful financial and planning nonsenses of epic proportions? The jury is still out but it surely says something that Isaacs has had three short-lived successors since he quit Covent Garden and that can hardly be his fault.

One way or another, it has been a devastatingly crass era in Britain's recent artistic history. We will have to wait and see what the House produces when it reopens in a few weeks. It will surely have to produce really magnificent work to justify the huge monies that have been spent on it so far (nearly #80 million pounds from a Lottery grant).

Readers of this newspaper might once have felt, with some detached complacency, that this was an absurd, faraway land of bulging artistic egos of which they needed to know nothing. Then we read the baffling news about the further bailing-out of a bankrupt Scottish Opera again over the past few weeks, along with the direst of reviews of its latest product.

Well, well. So what's new? Nol Coward wrote that people were wrong to say that "opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That's what's wrong with it." All that said, read this book. It makes the crazy goings-on up here in Scotland look almost tame by comparison.

Micheal Shea is visiting professor at Strathclyde University's Graduate Business School and is chairman of the board at the Royal Lyceum

Copyright 1999
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