Welcome to the house
After a £50m redevelopment the Royal Opera House is opening its doors to everybody. Claire Allfree takes a tour
IT’S 5.30pm on a drizzly November evening and the ground-floor café at the Royal Opera House is b u z z i n g . No t ma ny o f those clutching cups of coffee or a restorative glass of wine look like they are killing time before the evening’s performance of the 19th-centur y Russian ballet La Bayadère. Instead they look as though they’ve beaten a welcome retreat from the shops.
“We’ve had more than 100,000 people through these doors since we opened a few we e ks a go,” s ays the ROH’s chairman Ian Taylor of a visitor figure which has already exceeded predictions for an entire year. “I just love having lots of people in the place. You can come in now and you don’t need to have a ticket.”
The café is part of the ROH’s new £50 million, three-year redevelopment by architects Stanton Williams, which was completed last month and which has been branded as Open Up to make the point that it’s not just bricks and mo r t a r (o r s t e e l a n d g l a s s) b u t a manifesto.
Funded entirely by private donations, the physical overhaul of the 1858 Grade I-l i s t e d b u i l d i n g h a s t a ke n p l a c e relatively unobtrusively for a project that has included redesigning much of the interior public space and a complete rethink of the ROH’s Linbury Theatre, allowing the main building to remain open throughout.
Alongside the café, beefed-up shop and the newly refitted Restaurant Level 5 will be free and ticketed daytime immersive events, recitals, exhibitions and workshops, including the new Month of Sundays programme featuring props and performance participation opportunities. For the first time the ROH will be open every day from 10am.
“I had a real desire to knock out all this elitism,” says Taylor, 62, who admits he wanted t h e re d eve l o p me n t to e mu l a te t h e d ro p -i n e t h o s a t the Southbank Centre. “Obviously we want to make clear that what we offer is still really top quality, that we are not in any way dumbing down the programme. But I want everybody to feel they can come here and enjoy the ballet and opera as much as they want to, or nor at all.”
It’s certainly true that the new glassfronted bar on the fifth floor that overlooks the plaza and replaces the previous open-to-the-elements terrace, is now a classy spot for a pre-dinner c o c k t a i l . Wa l k i n g through the downstairs space that now connects the back entrance in Covent Garden with the main entrance on Bow Street via the shop and café, it’s fair to say the redesign’s flowing caramel crème aesthetic, all curved white walls and tasteful walnut fittings, embodies anonymous sobriety rather than edgy radicalism. Or as Taylor puts it “it doesn’t do anything crazy”.
The most significant transformation is the Linbury, which is now an elegant, Georgian-style 450-seat theatre providing a rare mid-sized venue for ballet and opera.
“To be honest, we found out lots of things during the refurb that make you slightly concerned,” says Taylor. “The structural problems were a nightmare. Particularly with the Linbury — we discovered damp and all sorts of things when we started peeling it all back.”
“To be honest” is one of Taylor’s favourite phrases. A wealthy businessman and arts philanthropist who made his many millions in oil and energy commodities, he became chairman of the ROH in 2016, although prior to that he was on the board of trustees.
He is honest, for instance, about the fact that he didn’t listen to much opera before he joined the ROH, although ballet has always been a principal passion — before he came to Covent Garden he was a board member at Rambert.
He is honest about the fact he has walked out of opera productions at the ROH because he thought they were awful. And while he points out that 31 per cent of tickets at the ROH cost less than £30, and that even the most expensive seats cost less than a box at Stamford Bridge, he also thinks sometimes the tickets are too cheap. “We sold out our current run of The Ring Cycle in about 10 minutes,” he says. “Which tells me we mispriced it.”
But he is also pretty honest about his determination to see the arts made accessible to everyone. This is buzzword speak of course — not many