Interview Transcript:
KIZ DURRANI: So, we're here at Riverside Studios on the 28th of May 2024. We're joined by Bill and Anna from the Tete a Tete opera company and, as previously, we're going to run through a few questions with you just to get your recollections of your time here at Riverside Studios. It would be useful to get just a sort of general introduction from both of you to your involvement with Riverside Studios and what Tete a Tete opera company was about.
We've had a bit of a look through the archives, and we've got a sense of your involvement, but it would be useful to get an idea of how you perceived your own individual roles and responsibilities and how you regarded your own involvement with the company at the time. So over to you. Just introduce yourselves as individuals and just tell us a bit more about yourselves.
ANNA GREGG: I'm Anna Gregg and I'm the admin director at Tete a Tete and I've worked with Bill Bankes-Jones and a number of music directors for many years. I'm delighted to be here because my initial reaction was very fond memories. Over to you Bill.
BILL BANKES-JONES: Yes, I'm the same. My name is Bill Banks Jones, artistic director of Tete a Tete and I have been with the company from the beginning. Started it really to do lots of things I felt unable to do in the bigger opera companies where I was working, with Royal Opera and English National Opera and other companies abroad. That was back in 1998. And after what were in effect residencies at Battersea Arts Centre and the Bridewell Theatre, we came to Riverside Studios. We're just trying to remember when, I think it was 2006 with a couple of big shows. And then we started Tete a Tete Opera Festival here in 2007 and had a wonderful time. Cycling here this morning after nearly a decade, it's changed so much around here and what really was bubbling up in my mind was memories of a time when there was a lot more resources and money. And things were also cheaper, so you could do much much more and be much more creative, without quite such a sense of panic.
AG: And I remember when we talked about what venue to come to in London, I'd done some other shows here with another company and I remember that the conversations with the team were very much about supporting us as a company to do work. And it just felt a really good fit for Tete a Tete then as well and we were very welcomed, weren't we?
BBJ: Yeah. Well, I found it thrilling to come here as a director. You know, you were following in amazing footsteps that way way back David Gothard had brought all kinds of people here, like Samuel Beckett or Jerzy Grotowski or whoever. And it was amazing to be another one of those. And the programme within which we sat doing our own shows was equally amazing really, companies like Complicite. It felt very, very flattering to be part of this line up. And the other thing that happened, that really suited us all very well was when - Tete a Tete the Opera Festival started as a way of really giving back to young companies in the opera sector what we'd been given by all three things that have gone out of business; the English National Opera Studio, Battersea Arts Centre and the Bridewell Theatre. I mean, two of those still exist but their focus is way off opera anymore and it was partly a reaction to loss of funding in that the Arts Council weren't favouring us so they weren't giving us any money and it was partly a sense of sort of, on the other hand, we had the infrastructure experience to give a bit back to littler versions of ourselves and help them develop and grow.
And where Riverside was a fantastic fit was almost the whole staff were decamped to the Edinburgh Festival in the summer, so we could come here for three weeks for what now is the price of one night in a venue we've used for the festival before. And it was a wonderful sort of cavernous space where you could... we ran three theatres a night, three auditoria. We chopped studio two into two halves and did different shows at different times in each half and used studio three as well and did things in the foyer and we did things by the river and we did things in the street and we did things all over Hammersmith. So, it was a wonderful, very liberating, free, easy playground.
Very different in those times because, before the rebuild, it was also quite tatty, which somehow meant that it was a bit more anarchic, and you felt like you could be a bit untidy and pop up anywhere doing something. But the best thing really was the freedom we had, wasn't it? With nobody here then and I think it was a great symbiosis, because the venue was grateful to have something going on while nobody had to do anything to make it happen.
[60.01] Lovely, thank you. And that really covered our first question about how you became involved with Riverside. Can you describe walking into Riverside in terms of any sensory descriptions, like smell or the space, the sounds?
BBJ: I think what I remember about coming into Riverside again is, I mean again the history was palpable. It was the building where you know, Doctor Who started or what is it, Quatermass happened here, didn't it? That it was still there, it was very quirky, it was very, like space everywhere, lovely food, which was really nice in a beautiful, light, airy restaurant. There was a lovely terrace by the river which went right up to the riverbank where - we performed there a lot, we had lovely parties. I remember having my birthday party there one year. The thing I remember most is sitting there for two or three hours, watching a cormorant trying to swallow an eel that was two metres long and it would just go so far in and then the eel would wriggle its way out and then would go back in. In these days of Tory sewage, I think there probably aren't any eels anymore. Yeah, it’s a whole other situation.
[7.38] Lovely. And anything from you?
AG: I think it's maybe what you look for as well, because one of my lasting memories is standing with one of our technical directors called Marius Ronning and I was discussing the amount of flotsam and jetsam [in the river] and for some reason I just remember them flying past. But the terrace was always a lovely space for, you know, you're in a time pressured environment and it was a lovely space to go and just relax.
But I also, as I said, I think at the beginning I remember a friendly, welcoming space. I mean, I agree with everything that Bill said, but from a kind of more practical operational point, people were helpful, you know? I mean, there were also, like anything, problems, but wanting to make something good is my memory.
BBJ: Oh yes, like the people that were still here gave us a huge sense of teamwork and support and they enjoyed what was going on.
AG: And after that first year, like you said, we were pretty much, we'd proven ourselves as a competent group of individuals and they were very preoccupied with all the stuff going up in Edinburgh. And, along with a few key staff, they basically said off you go. So that freedom was really exciting.
BBJ: I mean the other thing, I of course remember, was everything was stuck together with gaffer tape, with rips in the carpet with, you know, duff on it.
AG: The big truck. Do you remember when they said they’d had to drop in some TV programme with a big truck halfway through the festival?
BBJ: Well, that was incredibly annoying. No, it wasn't in the festival, that was when we were performing Push. So that was, we think, the first show that we did here in August 2006 and that had the biggest set we've ever had. So, it had a two-story hospital, through which a giant woman who was expecting, she had five grown up singers inside her and she had to crash through a wall to get out. So, the set was really complicated and really elaborate. And there was a show called The Mighty Truck of Fun happening in Studio One and yeah, it was incredibly annoying that they’d sort of double booked us. So, we’d built this set and then [they] said ‘Oh, you'll have to take it all down on Saturday so the Mighty Truck of Fun can drive out. Because they film that and then you'll have to put it up again’. It was incredibly annoying and quite expensive. Yeah, there were vexations like that, and we were probably a bit vexatious.
AG: We were probably very annoying. [laughs].
BBJ: I don't know though. I think if you book a theatre, you expect to be able to use it. And if nobody tells you that there's going to be some catastrophe like that, then you don't expect it. But anyway, as one does, we sorted it all out and the show must go on. And they all did.
AG: And that's kind of the point, is that the sense of memory of like, we're gonna sort this.
[10.36] You mentioned about the freedom that the studios offered you, which is obviously very important to you. What else would you say is distinctive or unique about Riverside Studios?
BBJ: Well, the history.
AG: And the location.
BBJ: Yes, but the history is two things, isn't it? There's what I already said about the footsteps in which you're walking and the tradition you're continuing, if there is a tradition. But it is also, you know, the rips in the carpet were made by Samuel Beckett and you know, Grotowoski. And there's that kind of feel of old theatre that you only get in an old theatre. It’s rather lovely to be sitting in a very new theatre, talking about these memories.
Anything else from you, Anna, on that question?
AG: No. I think again I agree with everything that Bill says. And the audiences that have been through here. It felt an exciting space.
And what would you say, what impact has Riverside had on your life and your careers?
BBJ: Well, it gave the festival a cracking start, didn’t it? I was just trying to think how many we've done here. The first one was in 2007, wasn't it? And the last one was in 2014. Your brow is furrowed, do you think it wasn't?
AG: No, I'm going to agree with you.
BBJ: I'm sure it was. So was that seven of them and it really launched the thing that, you know, I always felt at the beginning of Tete a Tete, you know, I said earlier on that I wanted to do lots of things that you couldn't do in the bigger companies. And one of them was to create a fringe for opera which, you know, by definition, you can't do in a bigger company, obviously. And it gave us an absolute turbo boost to that because, by making your own shows, you're just making your own shows. But by getting loads of other people to do it, loads of other people go ‘Oh, I can make a show’. And it took a lot of, not coercion, but encouragement and sort of, milking in a way to get people to come and do things in public and sell tickets in the first year or two. And then by year seven here, people had really cottoned on and there were lovely descriptions, weren't there, people just coming into a place where it was buzzing with people talking about new opera and new ideas and new things you could do in every corner of the building. And there was a rehearsal room upstairs, there were bits of foyer everywhere.
I remember sometimes we'd perform pop up operas through a cloakroom window! It was a bit like a Punch and Judy show, wasn't it? It was really that freedom, that thing of the venue just being left behind while everyone went and did something else. It was incredibly creative and incredibly liberating.
And the other thing that we did here that has tremendously potent memories and source of great joy was Salad Days, where a funder had really pushed us very hard to perform a particular new piece, which is very large. And we were supposed to be doing it in London and Paris, and it had an orchestra of 26 and 6 singers, and we booked everybody, on the strength of the pressure. But also, the money he was going to pay for us to do that, because he kept us going for three years when the Arts Council didn't. And anyway, this was all due to happen towards the end of 2008 which, as we all know, was also the big financial crash. And so, he called me into a room, and he said “Well, you know all that money I was going to give you to do that show? You can't have it and I'm not going to give it to you. You can't have it to do anything”.
And it was the most terrible spine-chilling moment, and I just thought, I'm not going to be defeated, something's got to happen. I've always wanted to do a production of Salad Days, this musical from 1954 that I have such vivid memories of as a child. So, we took the apparatus of Tete a Tete and used it to deliver that instead and fill that slot and it was absolutely joyous. The first-time round as the original production, we had 12 actors and four musicians, four instrumentalists. It was double bass, two pianos and a drum kit and it was just magical, it was absolutely lovely. There was something about it. It's the story of young people trying to make their way in a world messed up by the grown-ups. So, they're in a kind of post-war London. I mean, he's got a whole mad, fantastical element about the magic piano that makes you dance. But really, the core of it is that thing that this, the people kind of moving into a new world out of a horrible time. We could do that again now, maybe we should revive it. And anyway, we just did it for 12 performances and it got real traction. And William Burdett-Coutts just said, "I want you to come back and do it for three months next Christmas”. So, we did that. And then we did it again. So, in total, it ran for four years on and off and it was a lovely feeling. It was like, well it was a hit, wasn't it? It was packed, especially in the second run. You couldn't get a ticket and all the sort of glitterati of the theatre were coming to see it, weren’t they?
AG: Star spotting!
BBJ: But it was a very memorable weekend where, what happened? In quick succession we had Simon Callow, then Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant all came one show after another. Of course, the mainly very young cast caused a lot of titillation and excitement, didn't it? It was a lovely, lovely time. And I think, sort of strategically from a business point of view, the way that worked was it attracted an audience who all had dinner in the lovely restaurant.
So, I think it was a very, you know, even when it wasn't that full because they were tricky times. So, it was bad snow, the third run, which made it quite difficult for the audience to get here and a lot of refunds and God knows what. And illness - we cancelled a performance, didn't we? Because too many people got ill. But anyway, you know, financially and strategically, Riverside still did very well out of it because everybody would come and spend hundreds of pounds on dinner because it was that kind of audience. Quite unusual for us, isn't it? [both laugh]
AG: Yeah, I think I agree. I was just going to say quickly about, I was on a call recently with lots of opera companies and it dawned on me about how important the work that has strategically been led by Bill, that I've been part of, is for opera as an art form. And as you were saying about the festival, the ability to do that here has a wide impact way beyond. And it will continue way beyond Bill and I, myself and Riverside. I think it's informing changes in a very, very old art form, you know, in an exciting way. So, I think that's another bit of adding our bit to the history line and I think if you look back in 100 years and listen to this podcast, you'll go, hmm OK, maybe, and Salad Days was just a dream, you're quite right.
BBJ: Well, it was yes. But, in a funny kind of way, it was a demonstration of what you can do. You know what I said when I started describing how we took the apparatus of Tete a Tete and aimed it at this quite old, like, ostensibly redundant piece.
AG: For William, I think it's again, like a lot of things, they are quite personal. I mean, there are businesses that drive things forward for financial reasons and Bill's quite right, but I always got a sense that the team here and especially William and maybe Guy, you know, the guys back then, just had a deep love for a wonderful piece of musical theatre that was really well done and that again was a nice feeling, wasn't it?
BBJ: Yes, that was applied to absolutely everybody that was anywhere near it. We all loved it so much. You know, you still miss being able to come and see it every night. Did any of you three see it?
No.
BBJ: That's a shame, that's a shame. There are terrible videos on our website. But the trouble is, because the way I use the space in transfers, you can't really video it. It's like Wimbledon.
AG: You know, you had to be in that space. Some things just don't transfer.
BBJ: But there was also a certain amount of audience interaction that never looks good on video.
[20.20] Can you tell us a bit about some of your most memorable colleagues at Riverside Studios from that period?
BBJ: Do you mean people on the staff or...?
Yes.
BBJ: We keep, like, leapfrogging your questions, don't we? Well, William...
AG: William was great, but also quite aloof, for me. But partly because, you know, again, operational. The lovely Daniel. I thought it was really nice. And I had a lot to do with the box office people on the ground, etcetera.
BBJ: But it was a lot of people who were very junior staff here who have now gone on to really excel. So, for example, Adam Penford is now Artistic Director of the Playhouse in Nottingham. Simon Kenny has got a really great career as a designer, hasn't he? Daniel Thurman, who got us here, is writing for The Archers. Which I find very awesome.
AG: I remember him. I'm sure it was him that was telling me he'd had a play on Radio 4, one day front of house, commissioned or he'd submitted it, and they were airing it and he was absolutely delighted. I'm pretty sure that would have been Daniel. Yeah, about bird watching!
BBJ: I mean, who else do you remember? Nick Whybrew was absolutely a force of nature. It was him that made the restaurant so tremendously successful. And he was so able. I don't really know exactly what he's doing now, but he became more and more senior in Assembly Productions, didn't he? And organising bigger and grander things and not just restaurants. Who else did we work with?
AG: I can't remember their names, but I remember that ... I can see everybody. I can see the lovely blonde-haired girl. I think she might have been an actress, that was on box office and very funny and very cutting. Can't remember her name but she was great.
BBJ: But she died. That’s who you mean, isn’t it?
AG: Oh. She gave me lots of books with recorded music from her childhood to give to my children.
BBJ: Yes, I'm sure that's who you mean, because she was the only blonde one. That's very sad, isn't it? But it's a bit also terrible when we can’t remember her name.
AG: And then there was all the marketing and William’s right-hand lady quietly steering the ship. What was her name?
BBJ: Guy?
AG: No, Guy’s a man!
BBJ: I know!
AG: Judith [Murrell], it would be Judith. Isn’t she still here?
BBJ: Is she really?
AG: Isn’t Guy still here as well, no? Oh, no more.
BBJ: No, he outlasted William, didn’t he, and then left.
[23.04] Are there any performances or exhibitions that you remember seeing that are particularly memorable at Riverside?
BBJ: I completely remember the closing of the old building exhibition. Do you remember it, Anna? Because it went - we did Quatermass, we did Doctor Who, Samuel Beckett came here, Jerzy Grotowski performed, and Bill Banks Jones did Salad Days! I’ve never really had that moment at any other point in my life [laughs]. Yeah, that was terribly, terribly flattering.
The other thing I'm remembering is, and it's what I already said that it was like a massive sort of toy box or pallet or canvas or something and we used the exhibitions, do you remember? We got Ergo Phizmiz, who made marvellous sort of musical collage performances, also made physical collages. And one year we had an exhibition of his work. It was a place where you could just do everything.
And we definitely showed films, didn't we? Which, you know, way back was quite a surprising thing to do. I can't remember one of them, can you? We definitely did do that though.
AG: We did. I remember all of the, maybe not the work itself, but I remember the queues of the work itself. As in with it being a multi-purpose space, often there would be TV and audiences coming in during our festival and that was a lovely kind of clash of worlds, wasn't it?
BBJ: Well, we exploited it! I remember very, very well to test the idea of Tete a Tete at the Opera Festival, we organised a speed date event where lots of artists came and made an opera in an hour and a half and performed it. And I thought well, if we can do that, then they can understand that they can just do it and not ... because I think there was a big problem that way back in about the early 2000s was the only opportunity for people wanting to make new operas with big companies and big institutions like the Royal Opera or Aldborough would workshop a piece. So, you'd go and rehearse it for a week, you'd invite four of your best friends, they'd tell you it's absolutely brilliant and then it would go in a drawer forever and that was the end of it.
And I just thought, this is a silly waste. That if one did exactly the same process, but sold tickets for the end product, you would both get a less kind of sycophantic audience who would tell you really what they think and also, you'd done a performance. So, it was not a thing that had gone forever and gone to waste.
And I absolutely can't think what's led me down this particular track, but it’s sort of important that ... wow my brain is completely meandering away from a lucid, coherent thought... But something we did very, very early on was really interesting here that after the first year I said to our technical director Marius Ronning, how could we make this work better? And he said, stop every single director coming in and filming their own work. So, we then went and got some money from a marvellous sponsor, so that we could film it all and tell everybody they weren't allowed to because we're doing it and that was really seminal.
It also fits quite well with the way Riverside had kind of morphed slightly and William's ambitions at that point to make it a kind of digital hub, as were we and then we put all these things online and it means you can still watch what we did in 2008. Just go to the Tete a Tete website and it's all there. So, all this history is there for anybody to see. And the really extraordinary thing was, at the same time, the BBC had this same idea for the whole of the arts. So, it set up a thing called The Space, which is still going in a different kind of shape. And it was begun under the aegis of a guy called Peter Maniura and I kept turning up at conferences for about the first three years where he would very proudly say we've now got viewing figures of X and every time it was exactly the same as our viewing figures for our videos of Tete a Tete at the Opera Festival. There was something really extraordinary about that, that this was the BBC doing the whole of the arts with all their resources and us with, like, hardly any resource was somehow achieving the same results.
[28.06] Hammersmith as an area plays a role in the sort of life of Riverside Studios. How would you say Hammersmith has changed in the time since you first became involved with Riverside Studios?
AG: Well, we were just talking about that. I'm a West London girl so I've been here for many, many, many years. So, I've seen Hammersmith change tremendously.
BBJ: Well, to me it all came as a bit of a shock because I haven't been here for nearly a decade. Cycling here from, you know, I was about to say up country, giving away that I now live in deepest West Cornwall but cycling here from the east or whatever you call the middle of London, it was really unrecognisable. That was really quite weird that the change was just beginning, including the development of this building as we moved on and headed to King's Cross where we carried on for a few years and, do you remember Anna, we talked to a property developer to broker the kind of relationship we did end up with in Kings Cross, we were working in tight partnership with the property developer of that area to enliven the place and basically jack the house prices up by making it an exciting place to be and that didn't come to fruition here, I think because the scale is different, that there's like, little dotted around comparatively small things, they're not 100 acres or whatever King's Cross is. So, it's changed tremendously, a lot of London really, from a kind of slightly down at heel area to somewhere that's more and more expensive and coveted.
AG: It felt much more accessible, I mean, again, like I said, I come down here a lot and along the riverside but I think the fact it's been opened up through the development, that's that it always felt you had to kind of know where it was before, whereas now it feels very different.
BBJ: Oh, Riverside Studios?
AG: Yeah.
BBJ: I mean, I just don't know it because I haven't been here for 10 years. But, you know, it's a long way from West Cornwall.
[30.21] And leading on from that, how were audiences within the local community and particularly the local youth involved in Riverside?
BBJ: Well, I think that the big thing that we did, which was a fantastic experiment, and I wish we still could do was our pop-up opera. So, after one year, again it was an awful lot happened after that first year, I looked at the budgets and went, well hang on a minute, the amount we're spending on kind of hard marketing posters and banners and things, is enough. We could instead buy teeny tiny operas and take them anywhere. So, the second year of the festival was an absolutely fantastic time doing exactly that. And then, you know, we of course discovered and realised that you need a bit more permission. You can't just go and stick somebody who does really avant garde opera under Hammersmith Bridge unless you get a licence from the council.
AG: Parks and crematoriums [laughs].
BBJ: Yes, the Council department we had to get a licence off was called Parks and Crematorium. But that was only to perform in parks, it wasn't to perform in like King Square. We never performed in a crematorium, but we did them in office atriums like all the publishers towards Kensington. We did them in the shopping centre just around the corner from here. We did them outside Cafe Plum. As I said earlier, we did them all over the foyers. We did them in the parks, we did them by the river, we did them really anywhere you could possibly do something with a couple of singers and a couple of instruments.
AG: Do you remember, we worked with Sound Festival, and we did something in the estate? Do you remember we had to find another venue? That was interesting.
[32.21] You talked about how Riverside Studios, as was, in the time that you were involved with it. What elements would you say of the old Riverside Studios are missing today?
BBJ: The rich carpet. The physical heritage...
It's a different space now, isn't it?
BBJ: Yeah, very. I mean, I don't really know it because last time I was here, the studios weren't open. All that had been done was the flats. So, I don't really know, but it doesn't have the same feel of the nooks and crannies where you could do, like, four performances in the foyer at one time, another on the river terrace cos there isn't a river terrace, is there? That used to be a sort of private, enclosed place with a lot of restaurant tables where you could do a show or have a party.
AG: And residents complaining! This is where it took my memory now.
Are there any aspects of the programming do you think are missing today?
BBJ: Well, they're not programming us, then that would be lovely to come back, wouldn't it, do what we used to do.
AG: I can see what you're trying to do and it's very clear, I think, when you're looking at the listings and being around here and this piece of work, I guess, trying to illustrate all the things that we've been articulating, I can see that's, you know...., and I think it's still seen as a place for good quality new work. I think it's got that, its comedy strand, cinemas, I just think on the back of everything, it must be very difficult for everybody, all power to you, keep going.
So what difference, if any, do you think Riverside has made? And what differences did you see during the time you were involved?
BBJ: Well, I think it would have done de facto what I was talking about us doing for King's Cross, that by having a great big arts venue here full of celebrities doing TV and things like that, it does attract, you know, it makes it a more attractive place to live. I think that and possibly the River Cafe down the riverside path, what's it called? The tow path, I don't know what it's called, the thing down the river where you can just walk the river anyway, I'm sure that's boosting the area.
AG: I think, in terms of boosting the area, well, I agree with what Bill's saying, you've got the Apollo, you've got this place here. I mean, the bridge being closed, there's lots of pluses and minuses I think with the changes in the neighbourhood, you know, and it is for most people, absolutely out of their reach in terms of a place to live but as a central kind of transport hub, it's very good. And I think that, I know people who are coming to the new Riverside that wouldn't necessarily have been coming to the old one. I don't know if that answers your question but it's a change maybe.
[35.36] I think perhaps staying on that theme, you mentioned earlier about Tete a Tete endeavouring towards changes in what isn't quite an old art form. In the current environment what do you think could be done to make opera more accessible?
AG: I think we both agree what the answer to that is. But it's the time now maybe for you to bring something up about our art form because of what's going on. It's very particular right now.
BBJ: Well, yeah, I mean that is really a massive question that there's a sort of institutional sense that opera is under attack because it's so expensive and there's not enough money going in to subsidise the arts so opera's taking a bit of a battering as it was.
I mean, this is such a big question that, you know, earlier on I said, I started Tete a Tete to do lots of things that you can't do in a big company. So, they are making a fringe for opera, make workers more inclusive, much more new work. I mean, welcome everybody in at every level of the company, so not just audience, but also performers and in the power structure, in the management structure, as much as we can afford to, to just make it. And also, you can only do that if your material includes a lot of stories that are to do with us now.
So, it's put us in a very odd place because we're one of about a dozen regularly funded opera companies alongside places like the Royal Opera, the ENO and Welsh National Opera are the two that have really taken a battering in the latest funding rounds. And so, we’re suddenly in meetings with all these talking about where opera really.., the sector has failed to convene itself, people won't come together and I think it is partly a problem to do with big organisations and tiny little left field organisations and they just don't know how to work together. So, the big organisations are a bit sort of terrified and feel they're supposed to support the fringe and certainly from where I'm sitting, the reason I wanted to make a fringe for opera, which certainly has happened, is to support the big opera companies.
So, when you look at the theatre sector, which is where I very first came from, you've got a very pyramidal structure. You've got the National Theatre and the RFC and the West End standing on the shoulders of places like the Globe and the Bush, the Riverside Studios, Royal Court. And then there's, you know, more left field pub theatres or whatever, so that the fringe feeds it all.
And opera, it was interesting this morning, on the way here I was reading about the Grange opera season. So that is a kind of expensive, ritzy, it’s sort of get your butler to bring your picnic out, your helicopter type country house opera near London and I was looking at everybody who worked was listed in the performances that cut their teeth in the subsidised companies.
So, it's kind of... the structure is really weird because the top of the pyramid is kind of feeding something even above that, if that makes sense. It's very, very, very strange. And, anyway, in all these discussions that we've been having as a group of regularly funded opera companies, so that's like back to Royal Opera and Tete a Tete or whatever, I went to one meeting of that, then straight away to a meeting organised by the Clore Leadership Organisation, which is the thing to help artistic leadership which was being run by a lot of people from theatre.
What I saw there, it was a real revelation, that moment. I had come into opera from being on the Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme in two theatres, which are gone now, in Farnham and Leatherhead and they both ran what rep programmes were 30 years ago. So, you'd do an Agatha Christie and then you do an Alan Ayckbourn or a Neil Simon and then you could do your Shakespeare, and everybody would come because it's on the curriculum and then you might do a new play that's aiming for the West End and that's what subsidised theatre was.
In the intervening 30 years, it's completely transformed, and the programming of, like Adam’s doing in Nottingham or everywhere is much more, sort of makes sense of subsidy in a way, it's not so much about.... well, it is, and it isn't. The commercialism is a sort of James Graham commercialism. They are really telling stories of today to people of today. They're telling our stories to us now and opera, though there's a lot, you know, now people under threat of defensiveness about the repertoire are really telling old stories about situations that are often looking increasingly unpalatable, so generally, like the top 10 operas, most of them are about women being abused to death by men. Often these come in, sort of distastefully exotic settings, which are a bit disturbing now. And the contrast that morning when I went for a meeting of opera companies said, well, it's absolutely fine to do this repertoire because they're classics and then you go to theatre and they’re going, well, we're doing a whole new load of stuff, was really shocking, really, really hammered home to me that opera really needs us actually, that's what it feels like.
AG: And the work we've done over the last 20 years of which a large part of it was here.
BBJ: But also, I mean, that sounds very heavily critical of opera companies, and it's not intended as such. You know, that's where I did a big amount of my artistic growing up. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to be in the middle of that and it's wonderful seeing these people come out of that into places like Grange Park in this kind of weird inverted pyramid and to be part of this enormous ecosystem and people with extraordinary skills, you get milliners and shoemakers creating fabulous work and it's really under threat now, this is very, very sad. But what's also sad is the apparatus is being deployed to deliver this moribund repertoire, and it's happened, I think, out of financial panic.
So, you look at your spreadsheet and you go well, the bottom line is not looking too good. So, what went really well last year? Traviata. We’ll do 10 more of those and that's not sustainable, it's not working and the whole edifice is starting to crumble, that's very worrying.
I think a really, really interesting thing is, like when all the debacle has happened, the Arts Council commissioned a report on Let's Create It strategy for all the arts and opera and there was huge kickback from opera, not really particularly from the public, just from people in the trade about this and the first three angry articles I read, each of them said, criticising the classics, well, you wouldn't say that about the RSC and you think, well, hang on a minute. The RSC produce Les Miserables, that's like the probably the most performed work in the world that is on everywhere at the moment. They did Matilda, that's in Broadway and London and Brazil and other places. They’ve just done My Neighbour Totoro, all of these things are musical works that could just as easily have been made by an opera company, had they had the nerve to be broad enough with the vision and it's sort of heartbreaking because any of the opera companies could have made those pieces absolutely brilliantly. And Rebecca Kay was in the original Les Miserables, who then was in our Salad Days and has done many operas like Lulu in Canada or whatever.
So, you see, there's a kind of flow and ecosystem with a bit of a sort of barrage in it, that is, it's almost like self-harm by big opera companies, isn't it? It's a very upsetting time. I think we're all upset really, because it's very sad to see what's wonderful about those things crumbling.
[45.04] I mean, presumably you're of the view that opera should be for everybody.
BBJ: Yes, of course.
And in terms of some of the perhaps the themes being tackled by opera currently, is there anything in your view that could be done to broaden the appeal of opera?
BBJ: Yes, just tell, do this sort of stuff we're doing, make it about everybody everywhere now.
AG: Relevant stories for our time.
BBJ: Yeah, I shy from the word relevant because it's so triggering the words completely degraded now because you couldn't say in isolation, you know, it has to be relevant to something.
AG: But to people living now in this day and age.
BBJ: Yeah, and the old stories are that as well and, you know, women do get abused by men, we can't pretend that doesn't happen but there's something really concerning about paying £300 a ticket to watch that and, you know, go to Traviata and swill your champagne watching the champagne party that goes wrong, while you go home to your wherever and you are unsullied by this and have just shed a lot of the bad stuff by going through that catharsis, if that makes any sense at all.
AG: Perfect sense.
BBJ: But I think there's a sort of terrified colonialism about this where if you just want to feed, you know, we’re a very diverse nation and particularly a diverse city here in London and if you just want to feed everyone into a hopper that regurgitates stories about 19th century aristocracy, this is really in Europe, this is highly problematic. Stop it, tell other stories and deliver them in other voices.
AG: Especially if you're receiving public money.
BBJ: Yes, absolutely, I think you have a responsibility. You talk where I live in West Cornwall about this, and people just go ‘What are you talking about?’. Because they're contributing every bit as much tax as anybody here as a proportion of their income. They're not getting anything back and the exception being cinema from the Royal Opera in Penzance’s Merlin Cinema. But that's not the real thing. It's wonderful, it's brilliant they're doing that, just as we are in our own weird way on the Internet, but it's not the real thing.
[47:31] Thank you so much. And just finally, are there any other memories you'd like to share about Riverside before we close?
AG: I'm glad I've stopped smoking.
BBJ: [laughs] Yeah, it's an awful lot of cigarettes.
AG: [laughs] We used to go out the front and have a cigarette.
BBJ: Not much boozing though, I don't really remember doing that at all.
AG: I drove a lot so I never boozed.
BBJ: No, I used to cycle, you know, all through this time I had a flat in Islington, near Kings Cross and that was quite a sobering 10 mile cycle ride in each direction every day.
AG: [laughs] I’d jump in my car for 10 minutes!
BBJ: Yeah, I think also just the ability we had here to produce so much work, it's what I was feeling on the way here, but it was a time where resource was freer. We could just come here and pay hardly anything and have the whole building and have enough money to make quite a lot of work ourselves. And sadly, that's not really like that anymore and I think this applies to absolutely the whole of life in Britain in 2024, that everything is run down and knackered, just scraping through.
AG: But also, we are now, you may correct me, but when we were here with you, we were making all this new stuff, and we are now a bit of an institution ourselves and have been on this journey.
BBJ: Yeah, but it's a slightly weird situation where the outside world recognises Tete a Tete as an institution, but that's not reflected in our balance sheet [both laugh]. It's all in press digitation, isn't it? It's sleight of hand. It's more about ideas than it is about actual institutional.
AG: And this is why we're still really, really important.
BBJ: Well, I'd like to think actually, what is really, really important is organisations that do have enough money to fulfil their vision and not have to absolutely, endlessly conjure up ideas that keep you going.
AG: This is how we arrived here in the first place [laughs]. Full circle.
BBJ: Yeah, but that's not about the Riverside, really, is it? I think that's what really is my abiding memory - it’s very happy times where we had such freedom and resource to make the most of that. It has sort of changed the world in its own little way, hasn't it? And that's a lovely thing to remember.
And that's a lovely note to finish, Bill and Anna. Thank you so much.
