This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Those who would like to be seen as devotees of the Muses are having a fine old time squealing about the Proletcult-style despoliation of the arts in Britain, with public funding being withdrawn by a Visigothic Arts Council from their frivolous pleasures and devoted instead to increasing the wattage of the exciting Blackpool lights and encouraging multiracial bones-playing up north.

But all this talk of cultural desertification wilfully ignores the galactic piece of Dadaist performance art that has been evolving before our eyes since the moment in 2016 when the aesthete-activist wing of the Conservative Party seized power and ignited the era of experimentalist absurdism we have been privileged to live through.

Clearly intended as a centenary hommage to the founding of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, and the ensuing period of furious tohu-bohu created by Tzara, Arp, Ray, Satie, Picasso and the rest, the last six years of tightly choreographed auto-satirising mayhem surely represent the most successful and prolonged state-level cultural project in history, a realisation of Marcel Janco’s dictum that “Everything had to be demolished; we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

The last six years of tightly choreographed auto-satirising mayhem surely represent the most successful and prolonged state-level cultural project in history

T-May, BoJo, Gover, Moggy Mogg and the gang — no, not wreckers: creators, visionaries. And we can expect great things from 2023, the final act, with many imaginative performance-installations from the Book of Revelation to keep us warm before Russia and China finally get sick enough of our provocations to impose something more grown-up and save the world from these artists.

But it’s nice that opera has landed a walk-on part in the show before the curtain comes down. I shan’t bore you with all that sob-stuff about the defunding of English National Opera, a speculative bit of shtick that has by now no doubt been reversed with the traditional ten-yearly bailout of the company, pending its next elaborate suicide bid.

Some feel the arts council was a teeny bit over-eager to protest it was merely “following orders” in over-interpreting the enigmatic brayings of the pointy-hatted Liverpudlian donkey already relieved of the “culture minister” placard very temporarily hung round its neck, but nobody loathes and envies opera and its riches more than rival arts panjandra, and Arts Council puppet mouthpiece Nicholas Serota’s deft bit of knife-wielding has been greeted with happy smirks outside the music world.

My own view (supported by several reliable voices, some not even inside my own head) is that it was Angela Rayner’s well-publicised visit to Glyndebourne last summer that brought opera to the attention of the donkey in question with such dramatic and fatal consequences.

Angela’s foie-gras-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth appearance fooled nobody, of course — except the entire opera world, which soiled itself with delight that someone so common and northern had been enticed in … and on they merrily romped like puppies into the meat-grinder awaiting them in Nadine’s revenge.

Quite a good joke to emerge from the carnage was that Welsh National Opera, whose budget for touring fairly unpleasant bits of England was also well pruned, responded very much in the spirit of things — by sorrowfully removing Liverpool from its list of destinations.

And contributing yet further to the sum of human joy, ENO found itself babbling the many-layered untruth that the people of Manchester are “in no way heathens” in response to something some other moron came out with. And you tell me the spirit of Daniil Kharms, of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton is dead. Ha!

These two companies have between them for many years deserved the name “English National Opera” far more than the nominal, immobile incumbent at the perennially half-empty Coliseum

You’d think these opera people had been in the game long enough to know that the secret of success in this peculiarly despised corner of the arts world is to keep your head down — like the big non-losers in the Arts Council hecatomb, Opera North and English Touring Opera, both spared the axe. When was the last time you saw them in the news? Exactly.

As it happens, these two companies — the one serving Leeds, Manchester and other northern burgs with full-fat opera, the other embarking on extensive tours twice a year with a medium-scale operation perfectly suited to smaller provincial theatres — have between them for many years deserved the name “English National Opera” far more than the nominal, immobile incumbent at the perennially half-empty Coliseum.

While ENO lurched from one self-inflicted tragico-hilarity to the next, those two companies have quietly plied an honourable trade without ever troubling anyone with meretricious attempts to gain kudos by alienating their audience or bleating about the “relevance” of their little playground that everyone knows is simply the pastime of a tiny clique, the dimly-glowing embers of a doomed civilisation.

And what’s so wrong with that, anyway? Doomed civilisations are easily the best kind, and opera doubtless the jolliest way to enjoy the whole impending Gotterdammerung. While London opera companies have lost any idea of accepting that the people who wrote the bloody things had some dim clue what they were doing, and did not require help rewriting them from a gang of little Drama Studies jerks, the same doesn’t go for ETO or Opera North, or indeed Welsh National Opera.

I realise the fear of getting stranded in Leeds or Cardiff is a bit alarming, but just think of the opportunities that might afford for some hands-on levelling-up of your own.