ENO Scales Down at London Coliseum???

The opera is in trouble and it's not the Royal one either. According to a report today in The Stage newspaper, the English National Opera is seriously considering a massive downsizing that would include shutting shop for 16 months, making hundreds of staff redundancies and setting up as a part-time only company. Like the Royal Opera House a few years ago during the worst of its troubles, the ENO is about to launch a major refurbishment (estimated at a cost of £41 million) of its home, the London Coliseum. It has already begun its period of homelessness, with an intermittently programmed and peripatetic existence foreseen until at least January 2004. Now having an extended summer break, it is due to reopen in October with a limited season at the Barbican Centre. An ENO spokeswoman told The Stage that, while some of the harsher measures mentioned might be part of some "contingency plans", the official word is that the Coliseum's "restoration is on target time-wise and budget-wise". Recent woeful speculation has been fuelled by the sudden resignation two weeks ago of ENO executive director Nicholas Payne after little more than a year in the job.

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