When music and theatre gel, as Terry Gilliam did with ENO, the result can be unmissable art
When a critic describes a production as getting "a riotous reception", as one recently wrote of ENO's reinterpretation of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, it's not necessarily complimentary. In our case, he was referring to the fact that boos sounded among the cheers from the opening night audience.
This kind of reaction is more common on the continent than it is in the UK. Opera houses in Munich and Paris compete for the rudest audience prize. Audiences often boo singers mid-performance, and they sometimes resort to jeering in the interval.
Not that I'm inviting that from our audiences, but great art that takes risks can provoke a strong reaction, especially when it's in the hands of truly individual thinkers who hold up a mirror to the audience and ask questions about the world in which we live.
Sometimes even the notion that someone's attempting something different is enough to furrow the critics' brows. Tracey Emin, Mark Ravenhill, Damien Hirst ? as soon as they announce a new project their reputation goes before them and the pens are being sharpened.
My experience of this is when we have engaged directors from outside opera: some critics ? and a significant number of opera cognoscenti ? are sceptical, reading it as a quest for column inches. Hire a big Hollywood film director and it helps the PR campaign. No one sets out to court controversy; besides, controversy does not always sell tickets. Most of us in the arts strive for quality work, not press. The worlds of opera, theatre, dance and film rub shoulders often, and many of our great opera directors ? Patrice Ch�reau, Luc Bondy, Phyllida Lloyd ? began life in the straight theatre.
Yet there's an anxiety that the skills honed in one branch of the arts aren't necessarily transferable. Just because you can point a camera doesn't mean you can work with a large chorus of 80 people. The risks are real and novices are vulnerable: that's why big arts institutions have expert production teams who can guide them through their fledgling steps.
Michael Sheen co-directing The Passion around Port Talbot, Damon Albarn writing his first opera, the Royal Opera House staging a docu-opera about Anna Nicole Smith, the children's book War Horse becoming a West End and Broadway hit ? on paper all risky projects may be destined to fail but the reality is a different story.
Public subsidy for the arts is always under scrutiny and remains an enigma to the wider population. However, pound for pound public arts subsidy is of tremendous value to the taxpayer and here in London it helps to make London the cultural capital of the world. Arts Council money helps us to do work we would not otherwise be able to do; that is why it exists and why many of our international arts exports, such as Sam Mendes and Danny Boyle, started their life in the subsidised sector in the UK.
In my world, the opera virgin's healthy disregard for convention brings an all-important fresh perspective. In the right hands opera and theatre can express art's political and social content with tremendous power and directness. The Passion reacquainted the residents of Port Talbot with the importance of myth and legend to a community. Albarn's Monkey opened up musical theatre to a whole new audience. Anna Nicole offered the chance to scrutinise the culture of celebrity away from the hand-wringing of the complicit media. And War Horse is an intelligent articulation to the family audience of the terrible waste of violent conflict.
At ENO Terry Gilliam has been directing The Damnation of Faust. His re-imagining of Berlioz's "dramatic legend" refracted through the violence of German history from the 19th century to the Third Reich has resulted in an extraordinary piece of imaginative musical theatre, which is also an emotionally powerful production.
It's one of our most successful shows in recent years and we've just announced that the BBC will be filming it for broadcast in the autumn. There have been no great productions of this work to refer to until now. But Gilliam has set the benchmark and I am delighted that we are now able to bring it to a wider audience.
When music and theatre gel, as they do in Gilliam's production, the live experience with a full orchestra and 100 performers on stage is unforgettable. And that is the real way to reach new audiences with the arts ? to make unmissable, talked-about events that people demand their friends see. Better to risk the boos to gain louder cheers: if the reaction is riotous, we're doing something right.
Sarah Wynter Jaime Pressly Ashanti Jennie Finch Lisa Snowdon
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