Taking up the fight for Opera in Norwich & Norfolk

At Norwich Theatre our year began with the disappointing yet unsurprising news that Glyndebourne’s triumphant touring week to Theatre Royal in November 2022 would be their last after more than 50 years of coming to Norwich. Such longevity and presence in our city and county made the company a cultural highlight every year for many thousands of people. The company was a highly prized jewel in the carefully balanced multi-art form crown of our region’s only large-scale theatre.

Away from the stage, for 25 years Norwich Theatre also delivered a schools opera project which across that time saw 3,500 children and 350 teachers from 123 Norfolk schools engage with world-class opera-makers, including those associated with Glyndebourne. I also won’t ever forget a local hotelier and restauranteur in Norwich telling me, ‘keep Glyndebourne coming, cos that’s a brilliant week for us. The company had become part of our local fabric in many ways.

Norwich Theatre receives no regular public funding from Arts Council England, unlike many of our peer large-scale venues across the country. For us, Glyndebourne was a vital cog in the carefully engineered and hard-working machine of business model wholly reliant on audiences from Norwich, Norfolk and far beyond. Without the benefit of regular public subsidy, we generate every penny of our income through tickets sales, fundraising and ancillary commercial sales.?

Following Glyndebourne’s announcement, it is no exaggeration to say I was inundated with emails, calls and letters from a large number of audience members who are very loyal to our venues, not just in terms of touring opera, but across our whole programme. Our audiences are our main stakeholder above and beyond any other because they keep us alive. Never was this more apparent than during COVID and I have found myself reflecting on that period of time where we had to make a similar case. People look to their venue first. They trust us; many truly thought we were involved in the decision or, at the very least, okay with it.

In response to this I invited those who got in touch, and anyone else concerned about opera provision in Norwich, to a listening and discussion session in February. Around 120 people attended and some important points were made.

At the conclusion of the event, I publicly committed to representing our audiences’ views to Arts Council England and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); and working to ensure that audiences do not lose out on the range of production scale, diversity of creative vision and breadth of repertoire they value (and is available in other art forms) just because opera is their preferred art form. Since then I have watched and listened to the ‘great opera debate’ and its over-focus on English National Opera moving out of London; I have occasionally been listened to but I don’t believe heard and so I decided it was time to speak out for our audiences.

Over the summer we conducted a survey, ‘Opera Voices’, of our audiences to gather their views and tangible insights into their motivations. We published it last week, highlighting four main trends: audience levels in opera and demand for the genre have not dropped since Covid; The perception of opera is the challenge – not the art form itself; 25% of opera audiences, pre-Covid, were from areas deemed by Arts Council to be priority places due to low cultural engagement or by DCMS as in need of levelling-up in terms of culture; and the decisions to cut funding have adversely been discriminatory towards those with access needs and disabled audiences.

Arts Council England is undertaking an independent analysis of Opera and we welcome this but it must be swiftly followed with an inclusive action plan that represents touring companies, venues and audiences alike. I hope we can work together in a three-way alliance – the Arts Council, the opera touring companies, and the venues that are closest to their audiences – to look at how we work through this and find new ways focused on those audiences who have lost out.

Opera thrives here; it is valued here, and I am adamant that we do not let audiences and communities lose out.

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Get involved:

The research is available on our website: norwichtheatre.org/opera-voices

This month’s episode of our award-winning podcast, Norwich Theatre Talks is an opera special, exploring the topic with the General Director of English Touring Opera, Robin Norton-Hale plus two opera singers and a representative of our loyal opera audience.