Royal Opera chief takes the knee for Palestine intervention

Oliver Mears, director of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, has emailed an explanation to staff as to why he attemped to remove a Palestine flag from one of the extras during curtain-calls for Il trovatore

Among other things, he says: ‘I could not allow the precedent of a public and individual protest during a show, which is why I acted as I did. Bringing the curtain in, with an unrehearsed through-tabs curtain call, would likely not have ended well either. Unfortunately, in the end I think there were simply no ‘good’ options: this was a messy and unhappy situation and not least because of that, I hope that I can have your understanding.’

He went on to say: ‘A curtain call is not a window for individual artist either to act as if on behalf of the whole company, or to alert an audience to their outrage at the actions of foreign governments. In a democratic country such as ours – one which affords us multiple routes for protest – any other approach will breed chaos.’

He follows his chief executive Alex Beard in making himself accountable to an internal bunch of agitators. Covent Garden is now in the hands of the mob.

Read more here.

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