No, No, No, – ENO

You shouldn’t kick a man when he is down, just not sporting and all that, so I feel a cad giving the ENO a well-aimed blow where it hurts.

English National Opera are in “special measures”. This is the sort of thing that happens to schools that are found incapable of teaching their pupils or are blatantly wasting taxpayers’ money and to the London ambulance service. The Arts Council are not satisfied that ENO has a credible business model and their funding currently comes with many strings attached and may be withdrawn, so you’d think they would be on best behaviour.

ENO does have problems; an orchestra and chorus to pay and their home, The Coliseum, has  2,359 seats, the largest in London, is expensive to run. The Coliseum is one of Frank Matchham’s theatres. It opened in 1904 as a sort of music hall and after some vicissitudes, including being a canteen for air raid patrol workers in the war, became home for ENO in 1974.

Matcham designed more than 150 theatres and music halls including the London Palladium and the New Middlesex Theatre of Varieties. This last was renamed the Winter Garden Theatre in 1919 and a number of shows with lyrics by P G Wodehouse were staged here, including Kissing Time and The Cabaret Girl. I don’t think it is fanciful to think that Sir Geoffrey Parsloe-Parsloe’s seat, Matchingham Hall, and Sir Mortimer Prenderby’s Oxfordshire residence, Matcham Scratchings are Wodehouse’s tribute to this remarkable and prolific architect.

Matcham Scratchings was the setting for the Freddie Widgeon Story, Goodbye to All Cats. The Winter Garden Theatre was rebuilt and renamed as the New London Theatre in 1973. The musical Cats ran there for 21 years.

Now for the well-deserved, good kicking. ENO’s current production of La Bohème is a travesty. If you want to see Mimi portrayed as a heroin addict and more in this vein you may like the production. If you shut your eyes, she does sing well which cannot be said for the rest of the cast.

To be fair, their revival of The Mikado is a sure-fire winner and I enjoyed Verdi’s Force of Destiny too. I hope they extricate themselves from their travails.