The Royal Opera's panic over Israel is a crisis of its own making

Times

5 days ago

That loud bang coming from the direction of the Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) is the sound of a stable door being slammed shut. And the bolting horse? Well, there's been a whole Grand National of them over the past month.
First we had the dancer waving a Palestinian flag during the curtain call for the Royal Opera's Il trovatore. That triggered the frankly ludicrous spectacle of Oliver Mears — the RBO's director of opera, no less — leaping from the wings like some panicky stagehand to wrest the flag out of the dancer's hands. Which of course only made the incident more newsworthy.
• Privately educated dancer in Gaza protest at Royal Opera
Then came the open letter to the RBO management from 182 staff members (apparently under the tutelage of Private Eye's Dave Spart) praising the protesting dancer's 'act of courage and moral clarity', castigating Mears for intervening and calling on the opera house to 'publicly acknowledge the genocide in Gaza' and sever its ties with Israel.
The RBO management could have ignored this. After all, it has a permanent staff of 1,100 people. Fewer than 17 per cent signed the letter. Instead, Alex Beard, the RBO's chief executive, sent out an extraordinarily ambivalent internal missive. On the one hand he declared that the opera house's stage should be 'free from individual political statements'. Yet at the same time he announced that a new production of Tosca (directed by none other than Oliver 'flag snatcher' Mears) that had been lined up for rental to the Israeli Opera would no longer be going to Tel Aviv.
Naturally this was triumphantly seized upon by the pressure group Artists for Palestine UK (the activists who had organised the staff's letter) as evidence of the RBO management caving in to their demands. Which left Beard in a rather pitiful state, desperately telling anyone who would listen that he had scrapped the plan to send Tosca to Israel before, not after, receiving the staff letter. The decision, he claimed, had been taken not for political but safety reasons, as the new Tosca would have required RBO production staff to travel with it and set it up. And, he went on, although the Israeli company approached the RBO about hiring Tosca last December, no final agreement had been signed anyway.
But that only raises more questions. Was safety not a factor last December? Why would the RBO consider sending staff into any hazardous part of the world at any time just to earn a few bob for the company?
So those are the bolting horses. What about the slamming door? Well, here we need to scroll back to 2022, when many UK arts organisations (including the Royal Opera House) were decking themselves in yellow and blue and permitting their premises to be used for blatant (and indeed officially endorsed) political statements supporting Ukraine, condemning Putin's invasion and ostracising Russian performers seen as backing it.
I'm not saying that was wrong. Quite the opposite. I wish it were still going on. But it was effectively an admission that, in certain circumstances, even publicly funded arts organisations could and should allow themselves to be used for political propaganda.
Now that argument is being used against those same companies. 'If you encouraged protests supporting Ukraine,' activists ask, 'why not Palestine?' The response from Beard? 'Our support for Ukraine was aligned with the global consensus at the time. As the world's geopolitics have become more complex, our stance has changed to ensure that our actions reflect our purpose and values.'
• Royal Ballet and Opera says Tosca cancelled in Israel after 'safety fears'
In other words, 'it's more complicated now'. The invasion of Ukraine essentially united British opinion in condemnation. What is happening in Gaza, by contrast, has caused huge divisions in the arts, as everywhere else. Jewish performers and writers have been 'deplatformed' — most recently at this summer's Edinburgh Fringe. Jewish donors and charities have been made to feel so unwelcome that they are withdrawing their support from the UK arts scene — a massive loss. And, on the other side, the staff of many arts organisations, not just the RBO, seem determined to force their managements into cutting perceived links to Israel and making pro-Palestinian statements instead.
Beard isn't the only arts leader caught in the crossfire. Just look at the Tate where, eight months ago, more than 1,000 artists and art workers signed a letter protesting about the gallery receiving donations from a foundation with Israeli links. When she was recently asked by The Times if the Tate will be issuing any statement about Gaza or Israel, its director Maria Balshaw declared firmly that 'it's not appropriate for us to be making public statements about a political situation which is not in our control'.
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But didn't the Tate, and many other arts organisations, do exactly that with Ukraine? 'The limits of what we can achieve through doing that only became apparent later,' Balshaw added. 'We learnt from that experience and don't do things like that now.'
Which sounds very much like the boss of a stroppy workforce desperately trying to keep the lid on the dissent within her own ranks. And I'm sure that, up and down the land, many other arts leaders are in the same position as Beard and Balshaw — frantically trying to stick to the 'we don't do politics any more' line to keep the inflammatory subject of Israel and Palestine from entering their premises. Frankly, I don't blame them for trying.
Meanwhile, Beard's political problems with that new Royal Opera production of Tosca are far from over. Singing the title role when the show opens at Covent Garden in September will be Anna Netrebko, the Russian soprano still banned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York because she is perceived as a Putin supporter (although Netrebko issued a statement in March 2022 condemning the war against Ukraine). It would be astonishing if her appearance didn't trigger protests in London. I wonder if the excitable Mears will have to leap on stage again, this time to remove an illicit Ukrainian flag at the curtain call.