Across Britain punters are lapping up ultra-trad opera – the Arts Council will be disgusted

Another week at the opera, another evening with an elitist and ethically dubious art form. I love it; you love it; but the authors of the Arts Council’s recent report on opera in England are less enamoured. One issue they identified was that ‘the stories which opera and music theatre tells are failing to connect fully with contemporary society’. Possibly the memo never reached the promoters of Ellen Kent’s spring tour, which since January has visited 40-odd venues not typically served by major opera companies, and has done so without public subsidy. You might imagine that the only commercial outfit to make live opera pay in Wolverhampton, Ipswich and Sunderland would have featured prominently in the Arts Council’s research, but they don’t appear to have been consulted.

Anyway, it’s a bit awkward because it seems the stories with which contemporary audiences in Stoke, Bradford and Southend are choosing to connect (at least, when it comes to spending their own money) are fully-staged, ultra-traditional revivals of romantic warhorses – Carmen, La traviata and Madama Butterfly.