The Long View | We Need to Talk About Audiences

I have a recurring dream in which my professional world appears to be disintegrating before my very (closed) eyes. I walk into the London Coliseum to watch Jonathan Miller’s production of The Mikado. Instead of a large and enthusiastic audience, there are only isolated pockets of spectators in Matcham’s cavernous theatre - perhaps 75 souls in total.

The performance is well underway. Some in the stalls are chatting among themselves; others are reading magazines. Detritus blows about the aisles, where staff loll about uninterested and the odd furry animal roams. Children pull at their parents’ sleeves, begging permission to leave. The performers on stage are stopping, starting and bickering among themselves as they struggle for attention. The whole show is lurching from calamity to embarrassment. More psychoanalytically inclined readers may well note that yes, I live in perpetual fear for the viability of our industry’s wares, however wondrous they may be.

I stopped having that dream around about March 2020 (wonder why that could be…). These days, if you discount the on-stage debacle, it has been usurped by a grim reality. On March 13, Cardiff University musicology student Kerry Bunkhall tweeted a photo of the auditorium of the Wales Millennium Centre four minutes before the curtain went up on Welsh National Opera’s performance of Jenůfa. There were barely a hundred in the audience, and this at the home of Welsh opera. The production had garnered good reviews.

On 28 June, the composer John Adams tweeted an image of a similarly meagre audience at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, with no human life evident at all in the auditorium’s upper levels and perhaps under 200 attendees in total. Adams’s tweet suggested this was now the norm in North America. From the (albeit distorted) evidence of social media, audiences for midweek, run-of-the-mill Proms this summer aren’t what they were before 2019.

If this isn’t an industry catastrophe already - for the time being, plenty of shows are still selling out - it is one coming down the tracks. Poor audiences mean far more than a serious loss of box office income. They signal a wider lack of interest in what we’re doing, and will make it increasingly difficult for our orchestras and opera companies to justify their acceptance of a public subsidy. Why should they get taxpayer’s money when those taxpayers apparently don’t care?

It’s eyebrow-raising enough that the centre of operatic gravity in the UK is moving away from civic, wear-what-you-like, accessible (meant in terms of transport) performances by companies employing permanent, year-round music staff towards summer, champagne-and-social-media opera that can wash its own face financially (and great that it does). But if only 100 people want to see an acclaimed production of Jenůfa that employs far more than 100 people that very night, how long can a cost-heavy institution like Welsh National Opera survive?

Etched on my own memory is a fine performance of Hänsel und Gretel in Milton Keynes in 2013, during which I was dumbfounded with shock at seeing the worst audience of my career - a few hundred people (an optimistic guess) in an auditorium that can accommodate five times that. I left the show with an uneasy feeling in my stomach: the bitter truth that something I deem so essential and transformative really doesn’t do it for the vast majority of other people.

I used to work in classical music marketing. I’m more than familiar with the old maxim that if a show sells well, it was excellently programmed and if it sells badly, the marketing department didn’t do its job.

But in this case communication, accessibility, social responsibility - call it what you will - were all to blame. What made me furious in Milton Keynes was that Hänsel und Gretel is a piece that can easily make a newcomer fall head-over-heels for opera. I remember asking, the next day, why free tickets hadn’t been offered to schools, colleges, choirs, amateur orchestras, faith groups, civil servants, hospital staff, office workers - whoever.

In my days as a marketer, we didn’t have the aftermath of Covid to battle with. But we could fill an auditorium for a bombing concert, even if I was sometimes worried we were doing more damage than good in so doing (hard-core neoclassical Stravinsky and mediocre Wolfgang Rihm tends to put newcomers off classical music, rather than convince them it’s been badly missing from their lives). There are ways of ‘papering’ shows - and yes, it has to be the right shows - that won’t damage future box office economies and will deliver on the obligations of performing companies in receipt of taxpayer’s money. Jenůfa may not be Tosca, but it’s still an opera that can hit anyone with a soul right in the solar plexus.

So what are we to do about our empty auditoria? We need to get some sense of an appetite back. Assuming what we’re singing and playing is brilliant, that means not putting performers and ticket-buyers through the indignity of an empty house and instead, seizing the opportunity to welcome newcomers, whoever they may be, for free. When the world is a little more normal again, a whole load more people will know what they’re missing out on. They might just prove our saviours at the actual box office.