Sleeping through beauties ... Photograph: Haydn West/PA
Rupert Christiansen, opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, has started a hare running that I think we on this side of the political fence need to chivvy along. We may disagree with the Daily Tel on giving tax breaks to drivers of 4x4s and making hunting compulsory, but we can surely agree that the rigid starting times of arts events are ridiculous.
Christiansen's main conclusions are that classical concerts start too late, art galleries close too early, theatres should have more matinees, and the timing of movies is ridiculous. Spot on: if all this could be changed, plus some education offered to the audiences for each of these art forms, even I might go along occasionally.
I enjoy classical concerts very much - unless, as happened to me at a prom last week, the man behind me spends the entire time flicking through his programme. I was tempted to suggest he go home and read a book. But in truth I'm in no state to respond to a piece of music at 7.30 in the evening. I'm half-dead, comatose or drunk; trying to concentrate is hopeless. Chamber concerts should take place at 11 in the morning; orchestral concerts should start at 3; operas, as at Bayreuth, should begin at 4. No wonder post-work audiences get fidgety trying to enjoy, say, Die Rosenkavalier between 7 and 11pm.
There is a very funny story, told in Sir Thomas Beecham's autobiography A Mingled Chime, about the peerless conductor directing Götterdämmerung at a regional theatre. Halfway through Brünnhilde's immolation he was disconcerted when the curtain started to come down. He pressed the bell for it to be raised. Up it went, only to descend again immediately, rather undermining the apocalyptic closing moments of the opera.
At the conclusion of this debacle, Beecham hurried backstage to find the cause. One of the stage hands, it transpired, had fallen asleep, woken up at 11pm, assumed the production must be over, and started to lower the curtain. "I do not remember if we expected some little expression of regret from him for this unwelcome contribution to the evening's entertainment," wrote Beecham, "but if so we were most certainly disappointed. Far from admitting that he could be in any way at fault, he declared emphatically that if people did not know enough to bring any piece, opera or play, to its termination by 11 o'clock at night, they had no right to be in the theatre business at all."
Beecham's indignation was misplaced. The curtain operator was right. But the fault is not Wagner's. Götterdämmerung does not feel over-long at six hours, or the Ring unnecessarily padded at three and a half weeks. Rather, it is the managers of opera houses and concert halls who are to blame for not starting at times when audiences have the strength of mind to participate in what, if they truly work, are communal events.
You will say, "But people have to work." But who works these days? All the over-55s are retired, and all the under-55s are on flexitime. If they really wanted to, they could get to a Lohengrin that started in the early afternoon or a cycle of Beethoven late quartets kicking off at 11am. What joy it would be.
Sorry, the Beecham story took me so long to relate I barely have time to cover the other lacunae in arts thinking. The ideal time to view art, as Christiansen suggests, is about 3 in the morning, when you could plonk yourself on a camp bed in front of Botticelli's Venus and Mars. I fancy seeing plays just before lunch, in small theatres with large seats and hushed, attentive audiences. As for cinema, the timings seem to have been drawn up to ensure maximum annoyance: who wants to sit with noisy nocturnally inclined students and night-clubbers watching a film that starts at 9pm? Why not 9am?
Seize the day, arts managers, and leave the traditional 7.30 to 11pm slot for late-night shopping, the tedium of televised football, and family jigsaws. Life is short, art is long; and art never seems longer than when you attempt to absorb it after a day at work, a hasty sandwich and two calming glasses of expensive but poor-quality red wine in a crowded foyer full of earnest people trying to convince themselves that what they are doing is worth missing Coronation Street for.
