Private donors allow cultural curiosities to take flight

The nearest thing you’ll get to panto right now in London is the English National Opera’s new production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. It’s the highest camp in town: the combination of peers and fairies, a beautiful friendship between two earls – plus the appearance of what looks like Boris Johnson on a bicycle – makes for a flamboyant spectacle. The flying fairies are especially good.

This was the director’s idea. Cal Mccrystal was insistent that his fairies should take flight. But the budget was stretched; it looked like Iolanthe & Co would be grounded for the want of invisible rigs. Then someone approached Lord Glendonbrook, fittingly a former airways executive and Gilbert and Sullivan fan, and he came up with the money that, said Mccrystal, “enabled our fairies to fly”. It was a magnanimous gesture, especially given the way the opera mercilessly sends up the House of Lords.

What this episode also showed was the usefulness of private donors. The Arts Council couldn’t have produced funds at short notice for a director’s quirk. Indeed, the ENO has famously had difficulties with the council in the past.

That’s where a private donor comes in: there’s no bureaucracy, no delays in getting funds, and no need to justify your money on the basis of public benefit.

Of course, nearly all arts bodies rely primarily on taxpayer funding but for, most of them, grants are going up over the next few years by far less than inflation.

That puts all the more pressure on institutions to find private donors to fill the gaps. For instance, the journalists who attended the press night of Iolanthe made for the plush Ellis bar for refreshments – that was refurbished by a man called, yes, Ellis. Corporate donors play a big role, too: Screwfix, the nuts and bolts company, for instance, pays for material to construct ENO opera sets.

Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, tells me that the great thing about private donors is that they have the capacity to fund their passions: “For instance, [Lord] Tim Sainsbury has a passion for ceramics and he’s been tremendously generous in supporting the ceramics galleries and helping with acquisitions. It’s much quicker to get the support of a private donor than a public body.”

And you don’t have to tick the boxes that the public agencies insist on, for instance, about your “outreach” activities – so more offbeat or decorative projects can get funding as well as the big stuff.

Of course, there can be difficulties with private donors. The philanthropist John Studzinczi is a generous patron for cultural projects. He is also a Catholic, so when he provided the money for the British Museum’s Living with the Gods exhibition, linked to Neil Macgregor’s BBC radio series, he suggested a better title for it might be A History of Faith in 100 Objects.

The BBC apparently gave him short shrift; it doesn’t, it said, do faith. He still gave the money.

Yet, for the most part, this is a partnership that works for both sides. Lloyd Dorfman, who funded the theatre in his name at the National Theatre, observes that, for him, “philanthropy is a privilege and a pleasure”. The donor gets the warm feeling of having made something beautiful happen. The arts body gets funding it couldn’t get from the state.

Let me just note that Cal Mccrystal also wanted to enliven Iolanthe with aerial acrobatics and live animals. What an opportunity for a public-spirited donor.