Derryman makes his mark at English National Opera

Seán Doran has taken on the tough task of turning around the fortunes of theENO, both artistically and financially, writes Michael Dervan

The ENO was experiencing the sort of turbulence that the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden had gone through a few years earlier - although the ENO was spared the highly public washing of dirty linen that the Royal Opera exposed itself to through the fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary The House.

Productions by Catalan director Calixto Bieito had kept the artistic output in the headlines. One reviewer objected to his 2001 handling of Mozart's Don Giovanni as being a "coke-fuelled fellatio fest". A lead singer dropped out of Verdi's Masked Ball in 2002, complaining that the production was "an act of artistic vandalism".

Rather than being attracted by the scandal, audiences stayed away.

Then, in July 2002, after an internal wrangle, the company's general director Mr Nicholas Payne resigned, provoking irate letters to The Times from leading opera practitioners.

A group of opera directors protested that the board of the ENO "could not have devised a more catastrophic torpedoing of British operatic theatre had it tried".

Mr Doran, who had stirred up controversies of his own as director of the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia, knew that the ENO appointment might be a poisoned chalice. Commentators wanting to take potshots could point to the fact that he was coming to London without any actual experience of running an opera house, let alone a major one.

To turn the company around, he would not only need to revitalise its artistic output and stop the financial haemorrhaging, but manage a fraught industrial-relations situation and oversee the later stages of the company's £41 million sterling (€60.6 million) refurbishment of its theatre, the Frank Matcham-designed Coliseum.

Mr Doran, whose track record includes festivals in Belfast and his native Derry, as well as the directorship of the UK Year of Literature and Writing (one of a series of pre-millennium celebrations), is refreshingly blunt.

"I've wholly accepted that the arts are problematic, it's their nature. They're meant to be in many ways, in terms of how they're pushing the envelope or forcing the pace, and how you're trying to achieve things beyond the means available."

He remembers well "the burn that I had to take" when he shook things up in his first year in Perth and ran up a major deficit.

Losing money, he points out, is the best way of acquiring financial skills, once you manage to come out the other end. Perth grew from a 6.8 million Australian dollar (€4.2 million) budget on his arrival to a Aus$10.8 million budget on his departure.

The interview process for the ENO job was protracted, enabling him to get a clear grasp of what was going on, he says. And it may have affected the interview board too, because "who you're interviewing begins to influence what you are looking for but weren't completely aware of", he adds. "They were clearly looking for change, for someone who'd come from a different background and who could tackle this situation with different skills."

A redundancy process was underway before he arrived. The staffing level dropped from 530 to 460.

Unlike Covent Garden, where stars flit in and out, the ENO is a company with its own ensemble - as well as orchestra and chorus, there are 20 to 30 young singers on annual salaries - and when he examined the idea of abandoning that as a cost-saving measure, he decided against it.

"The strength of the company is in its ensemble basis and I can use that and exploit it better than previously, to raise sponsorship money against that point of difference."

ENO presents 17 to 20 operas a season, usually with six or seven new productions (which can cost up to £250,000), the rest being revivals costing £50,000- £100,000.

The Arts Council of England provides £15 million of the company's £26 million turnover, and ticket sales yield around £8.5 million. But, for a long time, the books haven't been balancing. The Arts Council injected an extra £9.4 million in 1997 and £10 million in 2003 in a process known as stabilisation.

To the outsider, the stabilisation process - to which other British opera companies have also had recourse - seems uncannily like a peculiar way of addressing long-term structural underfunding.

"I think that's not an unfair way of looking at it," says Mr Doran. "One would wish, however, that you could stabilise ahead rather than stabilise in hindsight."

His conclusion, after examining the figures for the past 15 years, is that ENO has been underfunded by around £1.5 million per annum. Bridging that gap is going to be one of his biggest headaches, although last October's three-year £3 million sponsorship deal with Sky and digital channel Artsworld - which set a record for corporate sponsorship of opera in the UK - plus £300,000 from MFI for a new production of Wagner's Ring cycle, have got things off to a good start.

"This last nine months has been principally management and administration and corporate leadership, knitting the company back together as one that coheres between board and staff, between management and artistic, from top to bottom between the different departments."

He discovered the world of an opera house to be extremely hierarchical.

"The art form of opera has been slower than any other at changing itself."

The mere fact of his sending a company-wide e-mail to announce his arrival caused ripples of surprise. He set up meetings with the entire company, 20 to 30 at a time, "not from departments or levels, but mixed", and found that "the will was there for a future" although, in a rudderless ship, "rumour had been dictating everything".

His open style went down well, and, he laughs, "the biggest issue that came out of the 13 meetings was the canteen - trimmed as a cost-saving measure - so I set about solving that.

"I was finding the company talking to itself for the first time. The big thing was internal communications."

As regards external communications, his early roasting by the British press had its advantages.

"I was actually quite content not just with the low expectations but the no expectations. That is pretty useful to have, rather than high expectations."

But, whatever the expectations, he sees his artistic challenge as mapping out a vision and then finding a programme through which to implement it - although, given the planning cycles of opera houses, that programme won't kick in until autumn 2005.

Although the word "vision" crops up a lot, he says: "I don't interpret it as some fanciful brilliance of imagination. Vision is to see clearly. It's as simple as that."

He also talks of "reinterpreting traditional values" and developing "transformation out of inheritance".

And, based on his festival experiences, he wants to "use the programme to drive the budget as much as the budget to drive the programme". He instances the possibility of fund-raising against a five-year series of operas by Benjamin Britten, much as you might against a cycle of Wagner's Ring.

Turning an opera company around is a slow process, and the long-awaited unveiling of the refurbished Coliseum has had to be postponed. It happens tomorr-ow rather than two weeks ago, and the opening production, John Adams's Nixon in China has had to be cancelled.

Embarrassing as this is (and it will eat more than £250,000 out of the contingency fund), things have improved to the point where Mr Doran and the ENO now win media sympathy for this rather than brickbats. The soft-spoken,43-year-old Derryman is already making his mark.