Can celebrities save ENO from oblivion?
Former BBC chief Stuart Murphy believes his starry contacts can rescue the troubled opera house. He explains his plan to Anita Singh
Can Holly Willoughby boost the fortunes of English National Opera? Stuart Murphy thinks so. On the wall of his office at the Coliseum is a spreadsheet of celebrity names. Willoughby. Davina Mccall. Alan Carr. Sebastian Faulks. Someone from The
One Show. They are Murphy’s secret weapon in his bid to sell us a night at the opera.
“It’s our collective little black book,” he says, reeling off a string of directors, actors, writers, artists and presenters, plus Roy Hodgson and assorted Chelsea footballers, listed on his chart alongside the size of their social media following. The idea is this: famous people are invited to a production, encouraged to tweet or post about it, and the same punters who might buy an M&S skirt because Willoughby wore it will come to see The Magic Flute because she enthused about it on Instagram.
“The effect has been amazing,” Murphy says. “A certain audience is like, ‘OK, they’re people I believe when it comes to selling shampoo or love watching on a TV show… I’ll give it a go. And I think that’s one of the engines underneath our growth of the box office.” The power of celebrity is one of many things Murphy learned in
his television days. The former BBC Three and Sky Atlantic controller was the surprise appointment as ENO chief executive a year ago. Candidates with far more experience in the opera world were passed over in his favour.
But, as Murphy explains it, what he brought to the table was a track record of taking creative risks while managing a budget. “That’s what I’m about and that was my pitch to the board: ‘I can do this. If that’s the version of ENO you want, I can absolutely do it’.”
His predecessor, former management consultant Cressida Pollock, steadied the ship after a period in which the company lurched from crisis to crisis, including being placed in special measures by Arts Council England.
The organisation was “in survival mode” when he arrived, Murphy says. But he insists it is now on a sound financial footing, with three years of funding guaranteed and a “comfortable” reserve. Yet ENO still faces the same problem it always has: how to fill the largest auditorium in the West End, the 2,300-seat Coliseum. Today he will announce that the lowest price tickets will be reduced to £10, and the scheme to let under-18s in free on Saturday nights is to be extended to Friday nights and opening nights. Hardly a recipe for minting money.
Widening out the free ticket scheme is “a major risk”but something he feels passionately about. “When I’m in my 80s and look back at my time at ENO, it is the thing I’ll be most proud of.” That and making the company more diverse: it is currently recruiting four BAME choristers (although the board remains entirely white and over 50).
The new season attempts to offer something for everyone. Besides revivals of Jonathan Miller’s The
Mikado, Calixto Bieito’s Carmen and Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly, and a fresh take on The Marriage of
Figaro from rising star Joe Hill-gibbins, there will be four versions of the Orpheus myth: Gluck’s Orpheus and
Eurydice from choreographer Wayne Mcgregor, which Murphy hopes will bring in a big dance audience; a “super-fun and silly” Orpheus in the
Underworld from ex-globe artistic director Emma Rice; Philip Glass’s
Orphée, a “niche opera obsessive thing”; and Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, featuring the flamboyant designer Daniel Lismore decked in tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of Swarovski diamonds. The season will also attempt to show how opera needs to show women as more than merely doomed victims and, for the first time, half the productions will be directed by women, including Rice, Netia Jones and Barbora Horáková Joly.
In his first season there were hits – Akhenaten had them “queuing around the block”, Satyagraha was “a crazy success” and Porgy and Bess set a £1.7million box office record – but also misses, with Lucia di Lammermoor, which, despite considerable critical acclaim, played to empty seats. Attendance for 2017-18 was up slightly on the previous year, at 71 per cent capacity, though down on 2015-16.
Not a cause for concern, according to Murphy. “If my previous experience taught me anything it’s that mediocre isn’t going to work. It’s got to be extraordinary. Either a spectacular punt on a huge scale, like Game of Thrones, or super-intimate and micro, where not many come but those who do would crawl over broken glass to get it. We don’t need the house to be completely full to keep going. So that doesn’t worry me.”
Murphy isn’t here to make creative decisions – that is for Daniel Kramer, his artistic director, and Martyn Brabbins, music director – and he is far more comfortable talking about the “visitor experience”. He is a details man; one imagines he would be just as good managing a supermarket chain.
“I’m obsessed with ‘street to seat’,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve spent enough time being obsessive about the experience people have when they walk through the doors.” Three times a week he works as a “greeter” in the foyer, and is not above scraping chewing gum from the carpet. “If people see me doing that, the front of house knows what standard I live by and they need to live by that too.” When I ask if he sometimes gets frustrated by the snail’s pace at which things can work in the arts, he pulls a screwdriver from his desk drawer and explains that the other day he took some signs down because he had asked for it to be done and a week later they were still there. “I am hard work to be around,” he admits with a grin.
Some of the changes have caused more traditional operagoers to shudder. There are plans afoot to project adverts on to the safety curtain, and visitors can now book a message on the surtitle screen. “We’ve had surtitles like, ‘To Sandra, you’re the sexiest woman alive even after 60 years, from Peter.’ We’re giving people a licence to relax and be normal and have fun.” Not too much fun: last season he banned water bottles after “someone got drunk by smuggling in gin and threw a loaf of bread across the auditorium”. One cannot imagine that happening at the Royal Opera House. Murphy is clear that ENO is a different beast. “[ROH] does a certain type of event. It’s gravitas and it’s scale and it’s royal. We weren’t set up to be that.”
Morale was low when he took over. He personally funded an all-staff Christmas party – by his own admission, he had made such an “unhealthy” amount of money that, after leaving Sky, he gave half of it away to charity. “The correlation between happiness and money stops at a much lower level than you think it would.” At 47, he now lives a simpler life with his partner, David Clews, and two teenage sons (he is amicably divorced from their mother).
Murphy found success early: he started in media as a tea boy and at 26 became the youngest person to run a British television channel. He claims not to have minded when people questioned his fitness for the ENO role. “It was important for me to see how passionate people were about ENO, how passionate people were about opera. I knew people loved opera but not to that degree.”
When he first turned up “there were certain nights that had 2,000 people in, a massive amount of people for an opera, and it felt a tiny bit leaden and quiet. For multiple reasons, ENO was in a bit of a groove of worry.”
Now, he says, the “buzz” is back. He takes me on a whistle-stop tour of the building, ending on the roof where we gaze at the globe that tops Frank Matcham’s grand building. ENO feels like a different place to the one he joined 12 months ago, he says. “It feels buoyant.” Does he have any worries? “Oh yes,” he replies. “There’s a constant worry that I want people to have a really nice time.” For further information about the new season, visit eno.org
A certain audience believes these people when they sell shampoo. So they think, ‘I’ll give that [opera] a go’
Murphy made such an ‘unhealthy’ amount of money that, after leaving Sky, he gave half to charity