Revolution in the stalls

Something happened last night, perhaps the biggest thing to happen at the Savoy Theatre since March 1896, when W S Gilbert had his final bustup with Arthur Sullivan, clearing the path for England to get serious, at last, about opera.

Last night was, to the spectator's eye, nothing out of the ordinary. A new production of Rossini's Barber of Seville, sung in English by an unstarry cast.

The revolution was unseen, in the bottom line. This was opera without subsidy, opera with an entrepreneurial spirit, that of impresario Raymond Gubbay.

It was opera as it used to be, organised by resourceful enthusiasts for an audience that consisted not of bow-tied aesthetes and glams in gowns but, in the main, of working men and women who might otherwise have been watching farce in Whitehall, a musical on Shaftesbury Avenue or a DVD at home.

After 60 years of public support for the arts and a general recognition that they are a jolly good thing, here was a genuine attempt to test the market and see what sort of people, and how many of them, might go to the opera if it was brought to them at a guaranteed professional standard (unlike touring Balkan companies) and at a reasonable price of between £10 and £50.

The answers to this impromptu survey will come trickling in over the next few weeks. They will be watched through wary opera glasses by Covent Garden and English National Opera, as well as by some of our more thoughtful politicians who have lost track of what arts subsidy is for and where it is heading. Examples abound of current confusions in this direction.

Wealthy estate owners and promoters of such Disney bankrollers as The Lion King, are lobbying for a wad of public cash to repair longneglected buildings. A matter of public interest, or merely a nice try-on?

Meanwhile Sir Peter Hall, once the nation's biggest subsidy-guzzler when he headed the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, now runs a private repertory company without a penny of public cash.

Next year he is opening a splendid new classical theatre in Kingston upon Thames to serve arts-starved suburbia and, perhaps, the boating classes. Sir Peter remains a stout believer in the principle of subsidy, though he receives none.

Then we have the Tate and Hayward Galleries, under eyecatching competition from Charles Saatchi. The Saatchi Gallery drew 600,000 paying visitors in its first year, many more than paid admission to any major exhibition at any subsidised gallery.

Saatchi, like Savoy Opera, has flung down a gauntlet to the official arts, declaring, in effect: justify thyself. It is game on in the subsidy debate.

The core purpose of state funding was defined by the great economist John Maynard Keynes in May 1945, at a time when Britain was bankrupt and needed to tap its creative resources.

"We look forward to a time," said Keynes, "when the theatre and the concert hall and the gallery will be a living element in everyone's upbringing, and regular attendance at the theatre and at concerts a part of organised education."

If those were the aims, they have miserably failed. Public t e levision, which once brought arts to every living room, has replaced them with celebrity culture. The education system has reduced arts teaching and placed it, all too often, in the hands of unqualified instructors.