Ebglish National Opera will put on fewer performances and rent out its West End home for the summer as it tries to bounce back from a disastrous couple of years that have seen its funding cut, high-profile resignations and industrial action.
The 2016/17 season, announced today, features 11 productions with 21 fewer performances than the previous season. ENO will also leave the Coliseum over the summer for a series of concerts at venues including Hackney Empire and the Royal Festival Hall.
It will perform the Mikado at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens — the first time it has left London in some 20 years.
Cressida Pollock, chief executive of ENO, said it was “in discussions” with potential tenants for the Coliseum, which is currently home to the sell-out production of Sunset Boulevard with Glenn Close.
She added: “In the summer it is about us ensuring we respond to what we’ve been asked to do and create more commercial and more profitable use of the Coliseum during that period, so we will be renting it out”.
The company has lost its chairman, its artistic and musical directors, and about £5 million in Arts Council funding since last year. Its plan to move its chorus to a nine-month contract led to a walkout before a deal was reached.
Ms Pollock said there were no plans to leave the theatre, which has a capacity of more than 2,000, but work would be done to the front of house to make it more accessible to the public during the day.
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“The Coliseum is our home, it’s been our home for coming up on 48 years this year, and we consider it to be our flagship residence in the centre of London and it’s so important that it’s here,” she added. “We have always said if someone builds us a beautiful shiny new home in central London we would absolutely be in discussions about it, but this is such an extraordinary theatre I don’t think we would ever want to move to something that is lesser.”
The new season includes performances of The Pearl Fishers and The Winter’s Tale, which will mark the directorial debut of Rory Kinnear.
The Bond star, named best actor at the Oliviers in 2014 for his performance as Iago in Othello, said he was “giddy with excitement” about the job.
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Ms Pollock, a former management consultant who worked for McKinsey, said 2016 would be “a turning point” for ENO and that in three years’ time she wanted to be putting on 16 productions. She added: “If we hadn’t started the changes we made we’d have run out of money a year from now to meet payroll. That is what we faced but that’s not going to happen because we are changing.”
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