Royal Opera's kowtowing to Israel haters is an act of self-harm
Next in line to receive a Hamas ovation will be Sir Alex Beard, chief executive of the Royal Ballet and Opera, who on Monday cancelled next year's Tosca production with Israeli Opera, saying he was 'appalled by the crisis in Gaza and recognises the deep emotional impact this has had across our community'. Beard, 61, is an arts lifer who worked at the Arts Council for seven years, the Tate for 19 years before Covent Garden. His world view is formed by right-on arts think.
Beard's Gaza intervention was provoked by an incident last month when an extra in Il Trovatore waved a large Palestine flag during curtain calls. The Royal Opera director Oliver Mears dashed out from the wings and made an attempt to wrest the flag away, only to be bundled aside by Daniel Perry, a self-styled 'queer dance artist, choreographer/movement director, and DJ'. Mears was heard shouting at the burly Perry that he would never work at the Royal Opera House again.
That eruption provoked a protest this weekend from 182 staff members – musicians, dancers and technicians and administrators, all courageously anonymous – demanding that Covent Garden change its stance on Israel-Palestine. 'Our organisation has chosen to actively support the Israeli state and its economy by hiring our production ... to the Israeli Opera,' they cried. '(It is) a deliberate alignment, materially and symbolically, with a government currently engaged in crimes against humanity.'
Never mind that the opera company in Tel Aviv is no more an arm of government than the one in London, or that the economic benefits of a co-production to either side are minuscule. This had nothing to do with practical politics. It was pure virtue signalling, unworthy of a response.
Guess what? On Monday morning Alex Beard caved in.
His capitulation was reminiscent of the 1990s, when Covent Garden stumbled to the brink of insolvency amid chaotic changes of leadership and a clique of in-house agitators led by a box-office clerk. Chronicling those events in my book Covent Garden: The Untold Story, I learnt a lot about the self-entitlement of underlings who land a job for life in the arts. It took years to remove the disruptors and restore stability. Now it seems that ancient insurgency has coalesced once more around the flag of Palestine and the straggly Beard's ineptitude to take the temperature of the house and the world at large.
With a timing matched only by England's lower-order batsmen, Beard's sanction on Israeli Opera came within hours of 2,400 Israeli artists demanding their prime minister stop the war. The two leading signatories of that petition were Dan Ettinger, music director of Israeli Opera, and its artistic director Zach Granit. Beard's decision was a slap in the face for the only stop-the-war campaign that has a hope in the Gaza hell of making any difference on the ground.
Israeli artists, lawyers, intellectuals, stagehands and retired generals oppose the continuation of this dreadful war with every fibre of their being. So do most Jewish friends of Israel. The nightly images of Gaza laid waste would move a stone to tears. So would the video of an emaciated Israeli hostage being forced to dig his own grave in a Gaza tunnel. That video was issued on the very day that Beard issued his tone-deaf Israel boycott. How hapless is that?
There will be consequences for Covent Garden. The Royal Ballet and Opera would not exist today without the multi-million donations and indefatigable fundraising of Dame Vivien Duffield, a supporter of Israel. Dame Vivien could not be reached this week for comment but friends do not expect her to be pleased. Nor will many others on whom Covent Garden depends for bequests.
The re-invitation of Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, a former Putin trophy, is a further misreading of what Beard laughably calls 'geopolitics'. This is an opera house that has lost all sense of global direction, coat-tailing a prime minister who has lost his moral compass.
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