ENO gets its groove back

You may need to pinch yourself after reading this, but I'm starting to believe that English National Opera has finally turned the corner.

The basket-case of British arts, on life support for the past 20 years, is showing record attendances and a break-even budget. Next week, it will announce no fewer than 10 new productions for the coming season, of which two are 21st-century operas. After a generation of comic mismanagement, internecine conflict and total confusion of purpose, ENO seems to have found an equilibrium and, perhaps, a survival mechanism.

Ticket sales at the Coliseum, which is London's largest theatre, are above 80 per cent this year after lagging in the low seventies. Private donations are up and there is no need to go begging for more bailouts - just as well since the Culture Department has made it clear that the next red line in the books may be the last.

Cuts have been made to orchestra, chorus and staff, but the turmoil is over, the unions on-side and the company is free to recycle its work in all media without extra fees. A line has been drawn. Confidence is returning.

Co-productions have been signed with Chicago, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels and Prague - and no fewer than 10 joint shows with New York's Metropolitan Opera, which , s i nce Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly, has used ENO as a cheap development house for future blockbusters. "ENO is the organisation in London that the world is coming to for partnership," says artistic director John Berry. "It has become prestigious to collaborate with ENO."

Profitable, too, for the Coliseum, since the foreign partner pays from one-third to one-half of the costs. This allows ENO to afford directors and designers from the worlds of film and fashion who, while sometimes offending regular opera-goers, have drawn in underthirties to see Sally Potter's Carmen and Zandra Rhodes's turquoise Aida frocks.

Even when iconoclasm misfires, as it did in Potter's smoke-free Carmen and (less forgivably) in Chen Shi-Zheng's swim-suited Coronation of Poppea, the box-office booms. There was an 84 per cent paid attendance for Carmen; 37,000 more watched it online. While Covent Garden and Glyndebourne are putting their shows in cinemas and DVD stores, ENO is taking opera live to an internet, film-literate generation. That, to me, looks like progressive strategy and, ultimately, to a fresh identity.

Next season, ENO will allocate Mozart's Cosi fan tutte to the extraordinary Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. The iconoclastic Richard Jones takes on the double-bill of Cavalleria/Pagliacci and Jonathan Miller returns after an inexplicable absence of two decades to tackle La Bohème.

Europe will get its first sight of John Adams's political opera, Doctor Atomic, and Kaija Saariaho's wispy L'amour de loin will receive its UK premiere. There is more challenging stuff in progress at the Young Vic where ENO is presently showing Olga Neuwirth's opera of David Lynch's film Lost Highway followed by Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy.

Much of next season's detail has yet to be inked and more will be announced in a week, but 10 new shows is a bold manifesto from a company which, only months ago, committed one of the worst howlers ever seen on a London stage in the ineradicably awful Kismet.

So what has gone right since, and why am I inclined to believe that it will continue to go that way? There have, after all, been many false dawns over two decades.

Well, confidence is a funny thing, difficult to measure, impossible to bottle. A near-full house inspires some insiders, a perfectly paced Death in Venice does it for others. The irrepressible enthusiasm of a young music director, Ed Gardner, has turned some doubters to believers; solid competence from the management pair of Loretta Tomasi and John Berry, neither of them natural leaders, has kept fingers off the panic buttons. Conversations with people at every level of the Coliseum staircase suggest that, for the first time in a long while, the pride is back in Frank Matcham's palace.

Which is not to say that ENO is out of the woods yet, not by a long walk. Coming up is a Bernstein Candide that bombed at La Scala; unless it has undergone massive remedial treatment, expect a return of the Kismet catcalls.

GARDNER, for all his brio, draws mixed notices from his musicians and has much still to learn. Some shellshocked company members cannot shake off a bunker mentality and changes are urgently needed to an all-sorts board.

Then there is the long-fudged matter of company identity, which has to be faced head-on and without fear. English National Opera took its name when it moved to the West End 35 years ago. The name has never meant much to anyone outside the inner circle of arts administrators, nor has it expressed the company's function - less so now than ever before. ENO cannot be English if much of its work is co-produced and bought in. It is not national when it never leaves London. And the constrictive-noun "opera" is a positive deterrent to the post-generic underthirties it seeks to attract. Even the defining act of singing in English must be re-examined now that the text goes up in surtitles and half the audience is multilingual.

Otiose, archaic and absurdly selflimiting adjectives have hampered London's second opera house from fulfilling its potential and plunged it into perpetual crisis. It needs a new name, one that will separate ENO from its blundering past and project its future purpose.

Myself, I'd call it The Coliseum, the Coli for short. That does what is says on the box, which is to present public entertainment at an elevated standard. ENO is brand of popular laxative; Coli is an earthy veg. A new name would signify a healthier lifestyle. When should it change the notepaper? Now would not be a moment too soon.

Lost Highway is at the Young Vic (020 7922 2922) until Friday. www.eno.org.