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.

The tour has visited 40-odd venues not typically served by major opera companies – without public subsidy

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. All thoroughly reprehensible, of course, and Butterfly in particular is the subject of grave concern at the subsidised companies. The Royal Opera hired cultural sensitivity consultants, like asbestos-removers, to decontaminate their ideologically-suspect Leiser-Caurier staging.

Meanwhile Ellen Kent’s version just keeps rolling along. Kent herself is credited as director, and if you’ve seen her production over the past two decades you’ll know the deal: paper-walled Japanese house, tatty backcloths and a bamboo water feature which trickles away – charmingly or maddeningly, according to taste – from first note to last. You get cherry blossom, kimonos and an adorable kiddywink playing little Sorrow. Barring some wear to the sets (it looked as if roof repairs were about to be added to Butterfly’s list of worries), very little seemed to have changed since I first saw it in 2006.