Downfall of the director who put sex, drugs and lavatories into a night at the opera

Internal links

Controversial head of ENO resigns after 'clashes'

Downfall of the director who put sex, drugs and lavatories into a night at the opera

Crises at a London opera house are not exactly unknown. Usually, though, they have taken place at Covent Garden, where chief executives have tended to change more quickly than the scenery.

The English National Opera has been a model of stability by comparison. And when the company poached Nicholas Payne from the Royal Opera a few years ago, it seemed it was entering an era of even greater stability.

Payne, an unassuming-looking man not outwardly given to histrionics or extravagant gestures, was an opera scholar with a passion for exploring the art, a passion that may have helped land him in trouble.

On the plus side he commissioned challenging pieces that won rave reviews, pieces like Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie.

Payne was also not afraid to mention the unmentionable at the ENO – asking whether, for example, the company should start using surtitles, since the audience could not always understand the libretto, even though it was in English.

Sometimes Payne was judged to have gone too far in his choice of radical directors. A Masked Ball, with the opening scene of the chorus on lavatory seats, was gimmicky. Don Giovanni, laced with sex and drugs, was hated by the critics but won standing ovations from the audiences, many of them new to opera. An incoherent Marriage of Figaro infuriated critics and audiences alike.

But it is part of the ENO's heritage to annoy. An opera-goer who wrote to Payne complaining that he had wanted a nice, pleasant evening received a letter back saying he had come to the wrong place.

Payne grew in confidence, and with that came the occasional decision that reeked of hubris. He directed a production of Il Trovatore himself, with the assistance of the music director Paul Daniel. It was a slap in the face for the ENO's young staff directors and directors outside the company, and an astonishing move from a man who had never directed opera professionally. The production received poor reviews.

Payne also suffered from the difficulty of finding a style and a character that would give the ENO the reputation for novelty and excitement it had in the Eighties.

But he was, slowly, attracting new audiences – though it may have been too gradual for the board, who were alarmed by some of the aberrations on stage and the uneasy finances. We do not know yet what happened between Payne and his chairman, the banker Martin Smith. But it will not have been the first clash between an artistic director and a businessman chairman in an opera house.

Worries over a deficit and a multimillion-pound restoration have overshadowed the achievements of a man who attracted young audiences, while occasionally failing to exercise enough judgement about some productions.

The statement released last night by the ENO is a depressing one. It said the company had appointed an acting managing director "responsible for the overall management of ENO as a business".

Those of us who have had many a memorable evening at the ENO in the past decade or two were not aware we were visiting a business. It is now incumbent upon Martin Smith to spell out a vision for the ENO as a leading international opera company.