Yahoo Sport 
Encore! How Opera Holland Park is rebuilding after the pandemic
James Clutton on the stage at Opera Holland Park
(Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)When the country was plunged into lockdown just three months ahead of Opera Holland Park’s first show of the season in 2020 - days before the company was due to start building its annual temporary auditorium - it could have been just another dramatic opera ending, but with no ladies, or men, of any size, singing at all.
Instead, after a year that included outdoor performances by the likes of Natalya Romaniw and Blaise Malaba; a shortened version of Pirates Return played to tiny audience members in fancy dress; a heart-rending online performance of Fata Morgana produced to mark Holocaust Memorial Day; and the semi-staged outdoor triumph of A Little Night Music, during which Janie Dee, playing Desirée Armfeldt in a scarlet sequinned gown, stepped out from under the pergola into the torrential rain for the second verse of Send in the Clowns (iconic behaviour), the organisation is about to open an already nearly sold-out season in this, its silver jubilee year.
The series of five full productions will kick off with The Marriage of Figaro, with a cast led by three graduates of the OHP Young Artists programme - 10 years old this year - Elizabeth Karani (Susanna), Nardus Williams (Countess) and Julien Van Mellaerts (Count), conducted by George Jackson. It will be followed by a revival of Rodula Gaitanou’s smash hit 2018 production of La traviata, with the return of the full original cast.
Holland Park’s first The Cunning Little Vixen (sung in English) follows, directed by company favourite Stephen Barlow and starring the electric pairing of Jenni France (Vixen) and Julia Sporsén (Fox) conducted by Jessica Cottis; then Julia Burbach directs a new production of Mascagni’s romantic comedy L’amico Fritz, alongside the Italian conductor Beatrice Venezi. The season comes to an end with the long-awaited co-production of The Pirates of Penzance with Charles Court Opera, directed by and starring John Savournin with Yvonne Howard and Richard Burkhard, originally scheduled for 2020.
Accompanied by the sound of drilling and birdsong when I visit, James Clutton, Holland Park’s much-loved director of opera, tells me that when contemplating this uncertain new season, he decided early on to “just get out and be bold and exciting in the beginning, rather than just wait for it to get worse again”.
That boldness, following on from the success of last year’s hastily pulled-together short season of performances, is manifest in OHP’s brand new, elegantly refreshed auditorium, created by the set designer takis and audaciously reimagining both the stage and the seating under the company’s iconic canopy.
Now, though singers will perform with more space between them, the stage will slope down towards the audience, creating a sort of close-up camera shot effect for performers, and a sense of intimacy for those in the seats, despite the increased distance. Those seats too will change - individual chairs replace banks of seating, giving greater flexibility for groups and making it easier to accommodate single bookers, while the sides of the auditorium will be open to allow better ventilation (that the season is being titled ‘A breath of fresh air’ is not an accident).
“I did a live broadcast a couple of weeks ago to our members, and one of the questions was, ‘without sides on the auditorium, is it going to be colder?’” Clutton says, “and I said,’Yes’. Please bring another jumper! But we’re going to tell you that, rather than pretend that it’s going to be really nice, because it probably isn’t, but it’s going to be better to be a bit safer. Are they going to be as comfortable as our normal seats? Absolutely not. But can we move them around? Can we get them in different bubbles? Can we keep you away from the next people? Yeah, we can. It’s just a series of compromises.”
One of the more wince-inducing compromises, and one which no number of blankets and hot water bottles can solve, is the number of available tickets, reduced, due to social distancing, from 1,000 a night to just 400. Ouch.
“Obviously that made a big difference financially,” says Clutton. “But we’ve tried to then say, well, let’s know that at the beginning, and then let’s concentrate on getting those 400 people knowing absolutely that they’re going to be as safe as they can.”
Clutton, who has worked at OHP for 20 years and before that as an independent producer in the West End, says that some of his colleagues in the business are planning to increase their capacity, if the rules change on June 21 to remove social distancing. “I’m saying that we’re going to keep to our number,” he says firmly. “That’s the deal that I made with people. Just because we could make a few extra quid, to suddenly make people sit more closely together, just feels a bit naff.”
Honesty with the audience and staff alike is key, he thinks. Unusually in opera, OHP pays a fee for their artists that covers the duration of rehearsals and performances for the production they’re involved in, rather than simply paying per show, “which means that you can be ill, and still get paid” he explains (that this is an anomaly is surely one of the things that needs to be changed following the recent report on the plight of freelancers working in the performing arts).
“What the last year has shown is that it’s built on sand,” he says. “So we had this massive company meeting on Zoom saying, you have to tell us if you’re ill. Because the impetus for freelancers that haven’t had any work for so long, is that they need the money. And so there’s a temptation, as silly as it sounds - you’re not feeling good, you think, I won’t get tested, so I don’t have to tell a lie, let’s just carry on going. So we said, you have to get tested. We’ll pay you, because the loss to us is going to be so much bigger. It’s better for me to lose the money by paying you not to come in than to have an outbreak. That could really, really hurt us.”
They’re also instigating a company-wide testing regime, and shifting rehearsals into the temporary tents (now with open sides) which, during the season, are used for corporate and member entertaining. “It’s just about trying to talk to people and be sensible, but also being honest with them.”
That clarity seems to have paid off - the company is up on sales over the same period in 2020 and 2019. Three of the productions,The Marriage of Figaro, La traviata and The Pirates of Penzance, have already sold out (they’re adding an extra date for each of those shows). “So of course, it’s much reduced, but there was still a doubt whether people were going to come out in those numbers,” Clutton says. “And they are.” Ticket prices are slightly higher - the top price tickets have gone up from £90 to £110 - but visitors are also putting their hands in their pockets to help out.
“We have a ‘save our seats’ campaign,” he says, explaining that he got the idea from his wife, Angela, a food writer (“we weren’t the luckiest household last year, with one of us working in the performing arts and one of us working in the food industry”), who saw friends that owned restaurants putting ‘invisible chips’ or ‘invisible salad’ on their menus.
“So you just paid extra for nothing, just to make sure that the restaurant had some more income,” he says. “So we just got invisible seats on sale this year, asking people at the point of purchase, can you just buy another seat? Because we’re missing 600 seats every night? You buy one of those and get nothing for it apart from our thanks.” They’ve sold “about the equivalent of one and a half extra performances on that so far”.
Which is a good thing, since corporate giving has more or less evaporated since the pandemic, with businesses indicating that though they’re keen to get back to philanthropy in the future, now is just not the time. Still, though OHP receives no government funding - and no state relief during the pandemic - individual giving is “substantially up”, Clutton says.
He puts this down to the company’s modest size allowing a closer, more personal relationship with their audience. One regular donor, he tells me, more than quintupled her biggest ever gift. When an astonished Clutton asked her why, she said, simply, “I just want you to be here when we get back.”
Holland Park Opera opens with The Marriage of Figaro on June 1, operahollandpark.com
Read More
Do Not Pass Go - Life-sized Monopoly game coming to the West End
