Jonathan Miller’s Pub-lic opera

Where is the audience? It’s a question that eats at every art institution in this age of austerity. Maybe opera houses feel it even more keenly than others: acutely sensitive to accusations of elitism and snobbery. Maybe Jonathan Miller will strike a radical chord as he turns the King’s Head pub in Islington into a new opera house this October; looking to escape from what he calls the immorality of “gigantic, gilded theatres” and “people luxuriating in displays of their wealth.” Maybe he and his (somewhat unlikely) eat-the-rich Robin Hood band of Joanna Lumley, Alan Parker, Tom Stoppard and Mark Ravenhill are putting more on the line than they care to realise when they rush to embrace an “everyman audience.”

Opera in pubs can be fantastic fun. That’s not the objection. Small and intimate, rough and ready, there is often real charm and immediacy in such productions. Even better if there is a good audience. Not a good turn-out (though that’s nice too) but a good quality audience. That does mean people of the right sort as it happens: people who are good precisely at being an opera audience; people who know it and love it; people with the ability to make judgements on what they experience. Such people are never born, never love opera because they are rich. They are made. Introduced to opera by others who love it, given the bug, schooled in it. An audience with a taste for opera.

Jonathan Miller may be right that opera needs to be renovated. There is certainly a shortage of people who can say confidently today just what it is good for. Who would stand up to defend excellence and beauty in opera without fear of being labelled patronising elitists. The vogue among today’s anti-elitist cultural elites is all for new audiences and ‘democratic’ immersive productions where the audience becomes the director: an almost conscious avoidance of very key questions. What is the moral idea of opera, what culture of moral feeling should surround it? What is it good for?

If Miller is right to look to renovate, though, he is going about it the wrong way by so publicly ditching the trappings of orthodoxy: the stage; the distance; the grandeur. Such things are ways of elevating what we experience out of the mundane and everyday: reminding us of the sacred quality of great art; giving us a bit of universal man rather than everyman. That’s why opera houses are like temples let’s remember. That’s why audiences sit quietly and contemplate and think about what they are feeling. They don’t need a “kick in the guts, or at least a thump on the heart” as Adam Spreadbury-Maher, artistic director of the King’s Head, would have it. Such things are available in pubs of course but you can get them at the Royal Opera House too. Equally concerned to appear not so stuffy these days, their current run of Niobe Regina di Tebe is only one he’s behind you short of panto.

If opera is to be renovated, regenerated, then where to start is with cultivating the taste of audiences. Not by chasing them. Take it to the masses by all means but take them the very best you can and demand the same of them. Whatever the venue.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Angus Kennedy is the head of external relations at the Institute of Ideas. He is chairing the Battle Satellite event “Opera, dead or alive? Relevance and value in the arts today” taking place at Folkoperan, Stockholm on Saturday 16 October. Additional events include “X-Factor: singing in the same of quality?” at the Royal College of Music, London, on Thursday 14 October and “Instrumental music: should music be a tool of social policy?” at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 30 October.

Recent Posts on Battle of Ideas

• 'Abortion industry': A slur on the women who support their choice
• Opera for the masses, by the masses?
• Twitter trolls and the Health Bill
• The bitter taste of sugar prohibition
• Welcome to the age of bespoke cultural identities