Opera-tunity Knocks!

When I was writing my since-aborted Ph’d on community theatre in the late 1990s I researched facts and figures about opera and it pretty much confirmed my already jaundiced view that it was a very heavily subsidised art form in the UK that took up a disproportionate amount of public money and offered little in return apart from piece-meal cut-price tickets and a bit of community outreach work. Then, as if by magic, one of the major London opera houses got a whacking multi-million pound Lottery grant for major refurbishment work – and two days later announced it was cancelling its theatre-in-education service.

I took this as a sign that my prejudices and research were bang on the money as I also worked out that the Lottery grant the opera house got would have funded something like 100 theatre-in-education companies for four years reaching more than 10million schoolkids in total. That’s a lot of art for a lot of people who may not otherwise have access to it, people whose money is now ensuring London opera lovers have convivial surroundings and comfy seats. Arts subsidy. Great, eh?

So it was with some trepidation that I plonked my arse in the posh rows at the Bregenz Opera Festival, a massive event where the stage floats on Lake Constance with the seats tiered up the river bank to form probably the most beautiful open-air auditorium in the world.

Unlikely opera-lover me had, of course, got on this trip because the missus had been invited to Austria on a press beano. Partners were also invited and, once several other people had turned her down, she decided to ask me if I wanted to go. I accepted and on Thursday morning off we went...

We landed in Zurich airport and, before the bus ride to Austria, I needed the loo. On shutting the door I was greeted with a hard-core porn magazine on the cubicle floor. I was impressed with this but my trips to further loos proved that this was a one-off and not part of some sort of continental service.

The missus did have to work on the trip so I also trolled around a few factories discovering things about kitchens that I never knew and we were also taken to several fabulous restaurants. It made me realise that I’m obviously in the wrong job as the only press trips I’ve ever had while writing about telly have been to Liverpool and Birmingham. And they’re not glamorous. At all.

The opera, though, was the highlight and it was truly spectacular and epic and, although it hasn’t changed any of my preconceptions about the accessibility and validity of the art form, I can now see the appeal and accept that it can be a very seductive and amazing thing to see.

Sadly a compartive event in the UK (as I don’t know about Bregenz arts funding) still doesn’t outweigh 10million UK schoolchildren getting the chance to see live theatre. But Austria was bloody lovely.