Stricken arts world keeps us going, so help it now

AS the coronavirus approached its peak in Britain and the cobwebs grew larger at London’s Coliseum, there came sad news that the English National Opera’s illustrious head, Sir Peter Jonas, had passed away.

It is not an exaggeration to say that during his life Sir Peter had grown the world of opera. Not afraid of taking risks, he presided over the glory years of the ENO in the late 1980s and early 1990s, flanked by conductor Mark Elder and director of productions David Pountney.

While the triumvirate spent those years in perpetual conflict with ENO administrators and the Arts Council over finances, they delivered some of the most memorable and cutting edge productions ever staged at the Coliseum, with dramatic imagery, modern day settings and previously unexplored challenging themes.

However, with Sir Peter’s passing we have lost yet another much needed champion of the arts. Science currently rules the world with a rod of iron, its generals apparently intent on destroying everything that the ENO and others in the arts have striven to build, often on a shoestring.

Faced with a lockdown that will continue in some form well into the end of this year and probably into the next, the arts are in crisis and there are no voices at the highest level speaking up for the hundreds of thousands of perfomers across the spectrum, or for their institutions that are without work and closed. 

From theatres and concert halls, to cinemas and stand-up comedy clubs, arts venues were the first to close before a formal lockdown for fear of spreading the coronavirus. Artists working in all of these were immediately put on the breadline, as were many contractors operating backstage. Social media is awash with real-life examples of excellent performers offering to entertain families via Skype or Zoom for PayPal pennies.

Where are the voices to find a balance between science and artistic life? In Britain we have a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. At present it seems to be chiefly concerned with the media, while maintaining a sufficiently visible interest in sport to keep alive all our hopes that football will soon return. Not much interest in culture, though.

Is it not ultimately the arts that are helping us get through lockdown? The content we are bingeing on Netflix, both films and programmes; the music we are streaming; the vinyl collections were are revisiting; National Theatre productions and others on YouTube?

It would too easy for the Government to say it cannot justify significant support for the arts when we emerge from a period of national emergency. While the sector’s funding will never rank alongside the quest for a vaccine, the country’s leaders and those able to influence them  - including the world of business - must not forget the huge contribution of arts in Britain to both exports and world culture.

At least pretend Prime Ministers in films get it.  Many in lockdown will have rewatched Hugh Grant in Love Actually celebrating Britain as “the country of Shakespeare, The Beatles, Sean Connery…” He would be the first to recognise that there is little hope of a phased return to a New Normal for the performing arts. In most cases their places of work are either fully open or fully shut. 

Put plainly, without an aggressive bailout, most areas of the arts - live or recorded - will be hard to recognise for long after the virus has gone.