Safe arias: how opera blazed the trail for the return of live entertainment

Britain’s small-scale opera companies have become surprise cultural crusaders this autumn. From urban drive-ins to remote rural settings, it is this most traditional of art forms that has so far had greatest success in bringing back live entertainment, while big theatres, concert halls and rock stadiums remain mostly dark.

Opera performance is usually associated with complex scenery, expensive stars and a large chorus of singers, to say nothing of a full orchestra, and yet a handful of inventive, fleet-of-foot productions are already under way. A combination of social distancing, cast “bubbles”, testing, private boxes and even sniffer dogs has been deployed.

This weekend, in what is believed to be a European first, English National Opera launches its “Drive and Live” production of Puccini’s La Bohème, to be watched from afar by an audience in their cars. Last weekend, at Garsington Opera’s venue in Buckinghamshire, the curtain went up for the first of a limited run of performances of a concert version of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, accompanied by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra. And in a London church early next month, a company gathered by the Welsh soprano Elin Pritchard will perform a one-night staging of the popular classic Pagliacci, by Ruggero Leoncavallo. A tale of love, jealousy and betrayal, it has been a crowd-pleaser since its premiere in 1892.

And vying with all these brave productions was what is claimed to be the first new opera commission since lockdown, A Feast in the Time of Plague, written only this summer by Sir David Pountney, with music by Alex Woolf. It was premiered by Grange Park Opera in Surrey last weekend for an audience of 250 and will be streamed free online.

Wasfi Kani, founder and head of the company, believes opera is well-placed to respond to the crisis: “We have a lot of summer opera festivals in this country, Glyndebourne in Sussex, of course, being the most famous and because picnicking is a crucial element, we were all equipped with a lot of outdoor space,” she said. “That’s something these wonderful old theatres in the West End certainly don’t have.”

Performers and crew were tested for antibodies and the company Medical Detection Dogs provided a level of virus detection. Audience members were also invited to bring along teddy bears in with them to help maintain distancing in the seating.

The company – which performs in a theatre in the grounds of West Horsley Place, the stately home that the TV presenter Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited from his aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe – is also launching an ambitious “interim” season of 19 works. Included is a new film of Benjamin Britten’s ghostly opera Owen Wingrave. The chiller, shot on location in a succession of haunted houses, tells of an army family who have locked away a hideous secret in their family house, Paramore, and it will be set this time in 2001, on the brink of war.

“People get frightened just by the word opera,” said Kani. “They think they have to know something first. In fact, they only have to feel. Music is something we all find moving. After our new opera, Feast, I wanted to make a film of Owen Wingrave so there will be something for the darker months.”

ENO’s La Bohème drive-in runs from this weekend to 27 September at Alexandra Palace in north London and is sponsored by Uber, which has released new research this weekend suggesting the dearth of live entertainment in lockdown has given would-be audiences “cultural cabin fever”. The nationwide poll shows that more than a third of Britons are keen to attend some form of performance soon. But just under a third said they would need to know they could socially distance at a venue. The artistic director for Drive and Live, Annilese Miskimmon, describes her production, which will go out on newly free-to-air Sky Arts this week, as “a huge creative challenge” that has involved “ripping up the rule book”.

The singers, raised on a covered stage and surrounded by large screens, use microphones, and sound is broadcast directly to audiences in their cars. The performers have rehearsed in two separate bubbles of 34 musicians, 20 chorus members and eight principals, with a backstage crew for each bubble.

At Garsington’s base in the grounds of Wormsley, the stately home that belongs to the Getty family, rehearsals for Fidelio, which will also be filmed, were impeded by quarantine rules. Director Peter Mumford was forced to rehearse via a large plasma screen because he had just returned from work in Austria.

For Johnny Langridge, Garsington’s head of membership, putting on Fidelio was a vital way to support backstage freelances. “We are determined to support the ecosystem that normally makes these kind of productions happen,” he said this weekend. “We decided we were going to keep a very high standard. We didn’t want to make a different quality of work purely because of the pandemic.”

Langridge added the “extraordinary landscaped setting” is something London theatres cannot match, but he denied that opera’s largely well-off fans have made shows easier to fund. “I don’t think so, but it is easier to go to individuals as one company than it is to wait for a big funding machine to work. The demand was certainly there, since the tickets sold out in 90 seconds,” he said.

At the end of last month, Glyndebourne, the grandaddy of English country-house opera companies, announced plans for a series of socially distanced indoor performances starting next month.