The latest news on the Royal Opera House/Manchester plan, which I wrote about earlier this week here and here, has just emerged. At a meeting yesterday between the ROH, Manchester City Council, Arts Council England and culture secretary Andy Burnham, the proposal was formally laid out and responded to.
Burnham was positive about ROH and Manchester City Council's ideas. So was the Arts Council; and it has commissioned consultant Graham Marchant to report on the proposal by the end of January.
There are some dangling questions - and maybe readers can add more.
1, Money. The estimated cost of the Palace Theatre's refurb is £80m. Where is this going to come from? Particularly in this financial climate? Manchester may be "owed" by central Government because of the U-turn on supercasinos. (A supercasino was a major plank of the council's plans for east Manchester regeneration.) But then there are revenue costs. If the ROH got even more share of the existing funds that is currently divided out between opera companies, I suspect there would be open rebellion.
2, Opera North, WNO, Glyndebourne... they all tour to the north Midlands and north-west. Is there enough audience to go round? Marchant will have to demonstrate that there is for the plan to go ahead, since an over-provision of opera and ballet - ie a lot of empty seats - would be disastrous for all the companies.
3, The Lowry. It cost £116m of public money and it opened only eight years ago. Is Manchester's municipal pride blinding it to the fact that there is a perfectly new and reasonable theatre just down the road? If the Palace Theatre was refurbished, it is easy to imagine Opera North wanting to move there too – but what would that mean for the Lowry, the company's current touring base?
4, Can Royal Opera House Manchester be anything other than a distant outpost of empire? I bring you Birmingham Royal Ballet, as an example of what it probably shouldn't be. ROH would have to make sure it produced work from Manchester – and some of its best work – or it will simply look like a poor relation of the London outfit.
5, Tentatively: is too much being made of Manchester International Festival in all this? Much has been said of the benefit to MIF if the ROH's plans go ahead. Yet MIF has had only one, albeit highly successful, edition. A large proportion of its funding comes from sponsorship and fundraising, which will be under pressure if we enter a recession. Worth noting that Ruth McKenzie, former general director of MIF, is Andy Burnham's special adviser.
