‘I’ve got to say this straight off the bat,” says the director Adele Thomas. “I was expecting this company, given what they’ve been through, to all have their arms crossed and to just not want to know. And actually, they’ve been so unbelievably welcoming. And that’s been a saving grace whenever we’ve turned around and it’s looked like there’s another bin on fire.”
Thomas is one half of Welsh National Opera’s new leadership team along with Sarah Crabtree, and since starting the job in January they haven’t been short of fires to put out. We first talked in April, days after they had given an impassioned speech at the curtain call of the company’s first night of Britten’s Peter Grimes, with more than 100 performers and staff behind them on stage. Four months of graft later, the planned autumn productions of Puccini’s Tosca and Bernstein’s Candide are on their way, and the 2026-27 season – Thomas and Crabtree’s first as programmers – is in place (details will be announced next March). The funding situation remains bleak, and yet finally there is a sense that, after three years of bad news, the company may be able to look to the future.
Thomas and Crabtree came to WNO as a team. They had known each other since 2019, when Crabtree – in her previous role as the ROH’s creative producer, in charge of the Linbury theatre – programmed Thomas’s production of Handel’s opera Berenice. (“Sarah’s always been the most adventurous and curious producer of opera that I’ve known,” Thomas says.) When the WNO role came up they applied, and were appointed as a jobshare, both holding the title of co-general director/CEO. Each works three days a week (in theory; it’s often been much more) and they divide up weekends on call. Thomas, originally from Port Talbot, had long been resident in Cardiff; Crabtree moved her young family over from London. “We share all of the artistic, producing and administration tasks of running of the company,” Crabtree explains. “We have different skill sets, and that’s brilliant, because there are times when you need to play to your strengths, but we can also bounce off each other. And we can preserve a bit of energy – we can step out in order to step back in again. There’s obviously a lot on your plate when you step into a massive job in a difficult time for an organisation.”
To say that the last few years have been difficult for WNO risks understatement. Based in Cardiff but touring to venues both in Wales and across west and central England, the company relies on Arts Council funding from both countries. The Arts Council England cuts of November 2022, which decimated touring opera in England, saw WNO losing 35% of its grant; this was followed the next year by an 11.8% cut from Arts Council Wales – sealing a steep decline in a wider Welsh operatic ecosystem (also including the sadly reduced Mid Wales Opera and Music Theatre Wales) that had historically punched far above its weight. When Crabtree and Thomas began in post they were taking on a company that had been forced to drop major touring venues and that was mired in fraught union negotiations regarding chorus redundancies and the idea of making an already understaffed orchestra part-time.
“We were really clear before we started,” says Crabtree, “that we want to protect the company as a permanent not a part-time ensemble. But it’s got to become smaller so that we can protect that core.” The orchestra remains full-time for the time being; the chorus redundancies, which took its number down to 20 however, have gone ahead, eight of them voluntary but two of them forced. It’s been heartbreaking, they say, but necessary. “The plan in all of this is that we don’t sell the crown jewels in this point of crisis, that we protect the integrity of the heart of the company. We want to run a company with artists and craftspeople at its centre. So that’s the million-dollar question: where is that sweet spot that enables us to be flexible, agile and small enough to create things that we want to do over the next couple of years, and then to build back when times are easier?”
“We are absolutely committed to making sure that we are always a large-scale opera company,” says Thomas. “That will never change.” What has changed, though, is that the company’s budget now is in real terms around half of what it was only a decade ago. “I don’t think that people realise just how bad the financial situation is,” Thomas says. “We’ve got to the point where the reserves have run out. It’s not the case that the company was operating within its means and then lost funding. Even the budget last year is returning a huge deficit. We can’t live beyond our means any more.”
Only a decade ago WNO was mounting eight major productions a year. The current season offers four, two of them new. And the 2026-27 season will look different again, they say. “There will be a different structure to the way that we’re presenting our season. We’re still a touring company and will still be in many of the places that you would expect, but we are adding some kind of light and shade in terms of scale,” says Crabtree. “There is an opportunity there, because we can create something smaller and more malleable that can go into more spaces and reach audiences deeper into Wales, and into England too.” Is there a danger that if they are too successful at touring shows on a smaller scale they will lose their mandate for full-scale work? No, they say. “Our partners in the venues have come out loudly and clearly and said ‘We want grand opera, our audiences deserve it’.”
What they want to provide, Thomas says, is “an electric night out – not a cosy night out, or an expensive snooze. And that is what WNO has historically done so brilliantly. I wanted to get into opera because I saw Richard Jones’s production of Wozzeck at WNO back in 2005, which is still the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
But how will they keep a full-time ensemble busy? One answer is to become a laboratory space, says Crabtree, noting that places where new work can be tried out and workshopped at scale have almost vanished from the opera sector over the last 15 years or so. “WNO is not rich in cash but it’s rich in resources and people and space. We can share that resource with the rest of the sector.” Another is community and engagement work – which, thanks to the newly negotiated contracts, is now part and parcel of the job for the company’s regular ensemble, alongside their mainstage work.
Then, and perhaps most importantly, there’s the idea that they are building “the opera company of the future”. What does that mean? “It’s about how we create a sustainable touring model, how we reach more people, create partnerships and break down barriers for those coming in – questions lots of opera companies are asking themselves,” says Crabtree, who talks about wanting to tap into the Welsh pride and democratic spirit that led to the founding of the company nearly eight decades ago. “I think we can take some of that spirit into the company and make bold decisions about who tells the stories which perhaps our English counterparts aren’t able to do in the same way.
“What we’ve found coming in here is that there’s a permission afforded to the two of us to do things differently – if they wanted an opera company to look as it did 10 or 15 years ago, they wouldn’t have employed Adele and me. We have a permission now to be brave in our programming in order to build that future audience. If you’re faced with a situation where that’s at the bottom of the list of priorities and survival is the top, that makes it very difficult to future-proof. But there is a future. We know what it could look like and we just want to get on and do it.”
• WNO’s season opens on 14 September at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, with Tosca
