Alex Beard: ‘We create
something out of thin air each night. It’s magic’
The Times
June 21 2014
We
are backstage at the Royal Opera House, where a 4x4 is parked outside a plywood
council estate — the set of Jonathan Kent’s new production of Puccini’s Manon
Lescaut. Scenery, costumes and props are stacked back-to-back on a colour-coded
floor (red means moveable platform, green means fixed) in this cultural
treasure trove. A singer is wandering the corridors practising an aria while,
deep in the Covent Garden labyrinth, ballet dancers are limbering up. “We have
three acres of central London real estate,” says Alex Beard, the chief
executive, leading us past a portrait of Rudolf Nureyev to his office, where a
screen shows the rehearsal taking place on stage. “I go to four productions a
week. It’s a private passion rather than a professional obligation.”
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Alex Beard, who took charge at the Royal Opera House
last year, rejects its reputation for elitism
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When
Tony Hall, the previous chief executive, announced that he was leaving the ROH
to become director-general of the BBC, “Nick Serota [the Tate director] came
into my office and reminded me that in my final interview for the Tate, when
asked what my life ambition was, I had said I would love to run Covent Garden.
This is the most amazing institution.”
His
career has never been plotted and planned. “I come from a very medical family
and it was pretty clear to me from a very early age that the one thing I did
not want to be was a doctor. I made early choices that made medicine as
difficult as possible, like studying classics.”
When
he was 17 his father died from lung cancer, which left him “wobbling on the
rails” for several years. “Losing a parent early on reinforces certain things —
that life is fragile and short and therefore to be grasped,” he says. “But I
put all of that in a dark box, half-heartedly went through university and got a
very mediocre degree. I bumped into Mary Beard [now professor of classics at
Cambridge] the other day, who was a tutor, and she said: ‘Yes, I remember you —
you set a new low bar in diligence.’” Under pressure from his family, after
graduating he spent a year training as an accountant before chucking it in. “I
was useless. I didn’t enjoy it at all, the abiding memory I’ve got is counting
hovercraft skirts in Dover in a freezing February with a bone-chilling eastern
wind.”
Instead
he ended up temping, “doing nothing terribly productive” until he got a junior
job at the Arts Council. With self-deprecating candour, he explains: “There
were a number of restructurings, so filing clerk turned into head of finance.”
One
of his roles was to be secretary of the commission of inquiry into the ROH,
which only deepened his a lifelong fascination with Covent Garden. “I scratched
at the cello as a boy, I used to sing a bit before my voice broke, my mother was
a flautist so music was always very much around the family. But the earliest
cultural experience that is seared in my mind is being taken by my mother to
see The Valkyrie at the Royal Opera House. I was only there
because her babysitting options fell through.”
After
the Arts Council, he was appointed finance director of Scottish Opera, but
turned down the job “because I fell in love — my wife Kate’s life journey is
from Northumberland to Notting Hill so two weeks into a relationship, she
didn’t want to go to Scotland to be an opera widow.” Almost immediately he was
headhunted to join the Tate. “I ended up there for 19 years rather than the
five I had in my head when I joined, because unmissable opportunities presented
themselves — like making Tate Modern happen. I had a wonderful time there but
all the while, this place was bubbling away in my head.”
When
he arrived at Covent Garden last September, it did not disappoint. “The
fundamentals of what the Tate and the Opera House do are similar — you are
creating a platform for the world’s best artists with constrained resources —
but the rhythm here is very different,” he says. “Each night you’ve got 350
people coming together to create something extraordinary out of thin air.
Although there’s a score, there’s certainly not a formula and it’s phenomenally
difficult and all-consuming and magical.”
Harriet
Harman, the shadow culture secretary, recently singled out the ROH for
criticism in a speech attacking theatre and opera audiences for being too
“white, metropolitan and middle-class”. Mr Beard insists she is wrong. “The
Royal Opera House — in part because of historic perceptions of opera, in part
because of its scale — is a lightning rod. But I just don’t think it is
elitist,” he says.
“Earlier
this year we had a performance of Carmen where the top-price
seats were £20 and we invited people in who had never been to operas before,
including traveller communities we work with in Thurrock. There was no sense
that this was not for them. Every show you can see for under a tenner, 40 per
cent of the tickets are £40 or less, and we have 22,000 members of the student
stand-by scheme. Yes at the top end we charge a lot for the central stalls for
extraordinary performances, but that’s necessary in order to be able to offer
the rest and appropriate because I think if someone can pay, they should. We
strive as hard as we possibly can to extend access.”
He
is appalled by the suggestion that some female opera singers are too fat.
Critics described Tara Erraught, the Glyndebourne soprano star, as “dumpy”,
“stocky” and “a chubby bundle of puppy fat”. “I think it was desperately unfair
on Tara,” Mr Beard says. “I saw the performance and I thought she sang
beautifully. I thought that was completely misplaced.” Ballet dancers have the
opposite pressure, with anorexia an increasing problem among young girls. Mr
Beard says weight should never be an issue. “If you can dance the role and
express the emotions and convince the audience, plus or minus a couple of kilos
is entirely irrelevant.”
The
ROH has a new healthcare suite for its Royal Ballet dancers, which deals with
eating disorders as well as injuries. “We are very conscious of the total
welfare of performers.”
The
Royal Ballet and English National Ballet seem to have been engaged in a
poaching war in recent months. Tamara Rojo, head of ENB, recently said she
thought the larger company was being “mean” by taking some of her most talented
dancers, but Mr Beard insists a “healthy exchange” benefits everyone. “One is
always on the lookout for talent,” he says. “Margot Fonteyn said great
companies are also about scattering seeds elsewhere. There’s a whole raft of
talent coming through the ranks.” He disagrees with the choreographer Matthew
Bourne, who is boycotting Russia in protest at Vladimir Putin’s hostility to
homosexuality. In fact, the Royal Ballet performed in Moscow this week. “It’s
hugely important to maintain cultural exchange,” the chief executive says. “The
only circumstances in which I personally believe a boycott is appropriate is if
you are playing to a segregated audience — that’s why quite rightly companies boycotted
South Africa during the apartheid era, but I think that’s very different to the
situation in Russia now.”
Mr
Beard admits he has a “deeply nerdy interest in opera and a zealous enthusiasm
for ballet” but he insists he is not a one-track obsessive. A Bob Dylan fan, he
“doodles” on the guitar and says: “I play cricket and tennis, I cycle, I cook.
I have a catholic approach to life. That’s what makes it worth living.”
His
daughter Bessie, 18, is “passionate” about visual arts; his son Alfie, 16,
wants to be an oncologist and has recently discovered acting. Their
extra-curricular activities have convinced him that education should be about
much more than exams. “Do you learn an instrument? Do you have opportunity to
do school plays and engage with tip-top cultural experiences? Do you have the
opportunity to express yourself and in the process discover who you are? These
things are absolutely vital.” He worries that the government’s school reforms
have led to a narrowing of education.
“There
are a whole string of unintended consequences that are deeply unfortunate
coming out of the focus on science, technology, English and maths, at the
expense of the arts,” he says. “The Russell Group universities’ move away from
interviews has a lot to do with it as well — if they are just focusing on exam
results as opposed to the whole person, then school will concentrate on exams.
That’s a deeply retrograde step. This country has always been on the trade
route not just of goods and services but ideas, and that’s where our future
prospects lie. An education that emphasises creative self-expression is every
bit as important as being able to be numerate and literate.”
The
ROH runs dance workshops for local schoolchildren and courses for teachers on
using opera in the classroom, as well as offering apprenticeships in set
design, lighting and stage management. Now it is also helping to devise the
country’s first BA degree in costume production, linked to a new costume centre
at its workshop in Thurrock.
“We
are helping to design the degree course. It will be Royal Opera House supported
and enabled and the next generation of back-of-house costume workers will train
alongside our staff,” Mr Beard says. “It all comes back to first principles. We
exist to enrich people’s lives through opera and ballet. That’s about people
beyond our audiences.”
Curriculum
Vitae
Born October 14, 1963
Educated Manchester Grammar School, Westminster
School, King’s College London
Career He worked for a year at KPMG before
joining the Arts Council in 1986. In 1995, he became director of finance and
administration at the Tate and was appointed deputy director there in 2002. He
was on the board of directors of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd from 2008 to
2013. He took up the role of chief executive of the Royal Opera House in
September last year
Family Married to Kate Warde-Aldam, a lighting
designer, with two children
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