He may be a successful seven years into his dream job but, in common with most mature bosses, Alex Beard worries for a living. Beard is the guy ultimately responsible for making sure the Fat Lady Sings (or the Thinner Ones dance) nightly at Covent Garden’s Royal opera house.
He must decide how to deal with the fallout from claims of sexual harassment by Placido Domingo over 30 years. (The 79-year-old won’t now be treading the Bow Street boards as Don Carlo in the summer.)
There have been allegations of impropriety by the Royal Ballet’s star choreographer and all this is before considering the lighting, stage flying systems, air conditioning and lifts, all of which will need replacing with more eco versions in the next decade. Domingo has denied the allegations.
And there’s Covid-19 which nobody wrote into the libretto. La Scala in Milan has been shut since February, but the RoH remains open for the time being.
“Complacency is the absolute devil,” he muses in his office overlooking the piazza. “Anyone who thinks they are on top on a job doesn’t really know what they’re on top of. London’s a success but I recall what it was in the early Eighties. Terrible. There’s no divine law that states London should be one of the great world cities. We’ve had two bankruptcies here and the New York City opera went bust…”
In the late Nineties being CEO of Covent Garden was a position you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The place was a shocking soap opera of a mess, its divas, tantrums and tiaras all over reality TV. It had burned or chased out five CEOs in five years in a welter of backbiting, near-bankruptcy, stroppy unions, interfering politicians. Things were put back on an even keel by Tony Hall, the ultimate sucker for punishment, who went on to suffer further on the rack at the BBC.
Beard first visited the Upper Slips aged 11 with his mother and was hooked. In his world he’s still best known for his time as Sir Nicholas Serota’s Number Two at the Tate. By funding and opening Tate Modern the pair transformed the institution into the pre-eminent arts success story in the UK of the past 50 years. But the opera house has been around in various forms since 1732.
The RoH is a substantial business, the largest single employer of artists in the UK culture sector.
There are 1200 people in the organisation when you add the opera to the ballet. The turnover is around £134 million. Its assets are sweated hard — 41 productions each year and a total of 500 performances makes it the most intensely used theatre in Europe. Some 40% of takings are box office, 30% soaking the rich via philanthropy, 20% from the Arts Council and 10% from retail.
It consistently achieves 96% seat occupancy and any closure will make an immediate mess of a highly sensitive balance sheet.
The numbers concentrate the mind. The slump in the value of the pound since the Brexit vote hasn’t helped when attracting top international talent — “we’ve never been able to pay top dollar like our rivals so it must be a hugely rewarding experience”.
Now 56, Beard offers hope for those Gen Z’ers who don’t have the easiest of times in their teens and early 20s. Those who aren’t bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, four A stars at A level on Route One to the career stratosphere.
And this is despite the fact he’s an ex-pupil of Manchester grammar school and Westminster school, two private institutions who produce far more than their fair share of overachieving kids.
He is the oldest son of an eminent plastic surgeon who worked in Manchester and Preston specialising in burns, and a flute teacher. His father, Charles, sang the Vivat, vivat Regina solo at the queen’s coronation but died at the age of 42 from inoperable lung cancer. Beard was doing his A levels.
“I behaved in classic fashion after his death by putting it all in a box and locking it away. It took me a long time to come to terms with it. I drifted a lot for the next few years, never going completely off the rails... no smack, or anything. But I had a pretty poor sense of who I was, what I wanted to be. It was a dark decade.”
While shacked up in a Wapping squat he scraped a 2.2 in Classics at King’s College despite receiving a letter of dismissal. AWOL from lectures, he was on the road with his girlfriend with two rucksacks — one for clothes, one for books. He wrote essays and posted them in from Seville, Marrakesh, Budapest. Then he went sailing and racked up some debts. “My grandfather [another doctor] was the only one with any money. So I went to see him in his consulting room but before writing the cheque he wanted me to agree to get a proper job. Medicine and law were out. So I got into Peat Marwick (later KPMG) as a trainee accountant.”
That went badly. “I was not a natural. They sent me to count hovercraft skirts at Dover. Not much fun. Then to Abu Dhabi where I couldn’t do any damage but I hated it. I made some money playing cards in the gulf and resigned.”
He was finally saved by arts admin and a temp position at the Arts Council. Someone should write an opera about it.
Beard is the most presentee-ist of bosses, in by 8am most days and still there in his box at half ten at night, pressing the flesh, easing out the Very High Net Worth’s chequebooks four nights a week. As he runs you round the cavernous backstage areas he knows almost everyone by name and greets them. His anti-canapé and wine regime means one trip a week to his personal trainer, cycling to work and playing cricket in summer.
Always present is the quarrel that opera and ballet are the pastimes of a monied elite, to which he retorts: “Thirty per cent of our tickets are £35 or less.” (They do huge amounts of outreach; a big Doncaster Creates festival kicks off soon with a Royal Ballet gala performance in summer.)
He has a point. You try going en famille to see Hamilton or Mary Poppins and you won’t get much change from £500. And that’s before you get rinsed £9 for 125 mls of nasty merlot.
Footballers may have taken an early bath but, to the surprise of many, at Covent Garden tonight the show goes on and Jonas Kaufmann in Fidelio remains the hottest ticket in town.
