Introducing the kickin' new Royal Opera House (and a very angry Jonathan Miller)

The ROH has turned to The Ministry of Sound for inspiration (and a logo) to attract groovy young people. The idea is simply 'grotesque', says one of its most famous directors. James Morrison reports

For generations, opera at London's Covent Garden has been associated with a culture of champagne dining and fox furs. But the black-tie brigade may soon find itself sharing the Grand Tier with a crowd that will appear to have wandered in from the disco down the road.

The Royal Opera House (ROH) is making a determined effort to win over the hitherto unconvinced "yoof" market, and it has gone to Britain's most famous nightclub, The Ministry of Sound, for advice on how to do it. The result is that the Royal Opera is, in its marketing at least, getting decidedly hip.

A new logo, mimicking the dance venue's, has been emblazoned on Day-Glo pink, orange and yellow postcards to be distributed in pubs and clubs frequented by 18- to 30-year-olds. The cards bear the words "dance music", "soul music" or "house music", depending on whether they advertise the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera or the house itself.

So eager are the opera's directors to ingratiate themselves with those who would normally spend their weekends frenetically dancing to the sound of electronic drumbeats that they are targeting their mobile phones and email. Popular classics like "Nessun dorma" will be available as ring tones from the opera house website, while anyone who contacts a number written on the postcards will be sent text messages alerting them to future opera performances.

The new marketing push, though primarily aimed at promoting a new series of free open-air big screen opera broadcasts, raises the prospect of Covent Garden's usual clientele being besieged by scantily clad girls in sequinned tops, and high-fiving, spiky-haired youths in shiny, skin-tight vests.

Sir Peter Hall, the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and an outspoken critic of "dumbing down" in the arts, said he was "all for" the scheme, praising Covent Garden for its attempt to engage young people. "We live in a frivolous, often stupid, world but it's quite a lot of fun. The last thing the art world should be is conservative."

However, the writer and opera director Sir Jonathan Miller described the use of terms and images borrowed from dance culture as "grotesque". "One has to have confidence in the art form being what it is," he said. "Imagine if the National Gallery started to hype up Giovanni Bellini, saying, 'Come and see nudes: no need to go to Soho to see porno.'

"Hearing classical music on the radio is one thing, but you can't lure people into going to see it by dropping scratch-and-sniff cards into nightclubs and bars. The best ways of getting people to come to the opera is to have cheaper seats." The best seats for this week's performances of Luisa Miller cost £130.

"There's always been a middle-class audience, and an affluent one at that, but again there has been, as there was in the 19th century, a substantial form of working-class interest in high art too. This awful word elitism has come along and in order to convince people that these things aren't elitist, people feel they have to show that it's something that's indistinguishable from something else that's popular, like Pop Idol."

The directors of the opera house say they are determined to reach as wide an audience as possible when they launch their new programme of big screen open-air broadcasts in cities including Liverpool and Gateshead this summer. They are adamant that infiltrating the places where young, socially active people habitually hang out is the best way of achieving this.

Caroline Bailey, the ROH's marketing director, said: "The first thing we need to do to encourage busy young people to take notice of what's happening is to get on to their radar – somewhere the Royal Opera House wouldn't automatically be. The Ministry of Sound has got a very distinctive brand and logo, so we approached the people who run it. They have a crown on the top of their image, and we've replaced that with the royal crest. Where they had a portcullis, we've incorporated the portico of the 1858 opera house building."

Text messages will largely be used to inform young people who register of forthcoming ROH-related events in their area. "We might also do things like saying, 'The Royal Opera's Madame Butterfly is on BBC2 tonight. You might want to watch it,'" Ms Bailey added.

"Viral" emails will urge recipients to pass them on to their friends in return for being entered into prize draws.

Tony Hall, executive director at Covent Garden, has long been trying to reach out to younger audiences. Seats for some performances can now cost as little as £3, and last year 12,000 children attended a first wave of matinees for schools. The ROH is also collaborating with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to involvechildren from socially disadvantaged and ethnically diverse backgrounds.

The RSC and National Theatre, which are also eager to encourage younger audiences, may follow suit if the ROH experiment pays off.

A tenner to hear a tenor. That's my price

By David Lister

What a strange and confusing week it has been in the quest to reach out to new audiences. At the National Theatre the audience whooped and chanted the name of an American chat show host as a party atmosphere enveloped the auditorium for Jerry Springer – The Opera, a show which contained more four-letter words in one aria than have been heard on all the National's stages in its 40-year history.

At the Barbican, meanwhile, there was another sold-out first night, but this time for an audience to watch an Ibsen play, directed by Ingmar Bergman and staged in Swedish.

At the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London previews began of Da Boyz, a hip-hop version of Rodgers and Hart's 1938 musical The Boys from Syracuse.

And now the Royal Opera House sees its chance of reaching that elusive youth market. Text messaging, arias as ring tones, postcards, and an all-round snazzier image.So in which direction are we heading? Upmarket? Down? Meeting young people halfway? The answer is in every direction, except one: head-on, with the promise of cheaper tickets. Most young people think of opera and theatre as too expensive a night out. It's no longer enough to say that low prices are available in the "gods". Good seats too must be available for certain performances at prices way below the often grotesque levels at the Royal Opera House. My own campaign in The Independent for cheaper tickets – The Lister Experiment – urged that best seats be available at cinema prices for one performance a week. The West End producers who took up the idea found that they reached people who had never been to the theatre before.

"Opera for a tenner!" might be a more effective slogan than "House music". Especially if they were best seats.

David Lister is Arts Editor of The Independent