Is your type allowed in here? Christopher Maltman rehearses Don Giovanni in Salzburg. Photograph: Hans Klaus Techt/EPA
The Royal Opera House is famously the Arts Council's biggest single client, due to receive some £28.4m of the council's total £467m budget in 2010-11. But with massive subsidy comes great responsibility.
No wonder the ROH is at last keen to dispel the corporate champagne-and-canapés image that currently attaches itself to the place. Tony Hall, its chief executive, has duly trumpeted his organisation's new media partnership with The Sun - in which readers of the paper will this week get the chance to enter into a ballot for cheaper tickets for the first night of their production of Don Giovanni on September 8 - as an opportunity for the opera to be performed for what Hall describes as "an audience of new faces - people who perhaps may not have thought that the Royal Opera House was for them, or who felt it was too expensive".
But it could well be that, on the contrary, it merely encourages a new breed of Sun reader instead, who may not have thought that the paper was for them, but will be buying it purely for the opportunity to enter the ballot. And for all the media coverage it has now garnered, it's a cheap bit of promotion, in every sense: only 2,200 seats are available overall.
It is actually far more significant - and more wide-reaching - that live transmissions of Opera House performances will be made to cinemas around the country. As Hall himself admits, "30% of our turnover comes from an Arts Council grant, and yet it is difficult for people outside of the south-east of England to get to the Royal Opera House."
Ticket prices may be a deterrent, but it's not just about money: theatres also need to make their work both relevant and culturally accessible to their own audiences. For years now, Stratford East's Theatre Royal has been quietly effecting a local revolution by turning the theatre into a vital part of the community, where what's on stage directly reflects the concerns of the audience. An amazing two-way dialogue (sometimes even during the shows themselves) happens between the two.
Or look at the revamped Liverpool Playhouse and Everyman, where a hit musical based on the history of a notorious local hotel, Once upon a Time at the Adelphi, has shown that audiences turn out in droves to support something both relevant and resonant to them. There are no ballots required: audiences are voting with their feet.
That's strikingly different from what's happening at the Royal Opera House. You might even say that the Sun competition actually reinforces the elitism at the root of the problem, proving just how hard affordable tickets are to come by - in effect making it into another of life's lotteries. What's needed are not one-off stunts like this, but a longer-term approach to letting local audiences share in the art on display. They have already paid for it, after all.
