I think it’s very important to get the right staff at places like opera houses. The wrong people can affect your whole enjoyment of a night out. The staff need to treat you with respect and they need to be able to speak good enough English (or good enough French if they’re in France, good enough German if they’re in Germany, you can see where I’m going with this) to do their job properly. But there are still loads of people around who don’t do this.
So starting with the ROH. There are some people around who’ve been there for years, some people you literally just see once then never notice again, then there are people you see every time for ages then they just disappear. Maybe they’re working somewhere else in the opera house, you don’t know but it seems like there are new people coming in all the time.
I’m fine with this and I understand the ROH is a complicated place with millions of seats so especially if you’re just starting out there might be some members of staff who don’t know where every individual seat is, I understand that. But what really pisses me off is when you ask them what I would consider a basic question and they don’t understand you. Like my ex-girlfriend Sophie, she gets breathing problems sometimes and once it was really bad and she wanted a medical person to help her. So she went to an usher and asked for a first-aider but they didn’t understand what that meant. So she explained what was wrong and they still didn’t understand. She asked them to turn the air-con up so it was less stuffy, they didn’t know what air-con was. So she gave up after that.
I think if you work at a place like the ROH you need to know words like first-aider in all the main languages like French, German, Spanish, Italian but as you’re in an opera house in English you should especially know it in English. Luckily Sophie exaggerates everything so she was fine but what if someone was really ill and they couldn’t get help? I also don’t like the way they tell you off for being late. Okay you’ve got to have a word if they’re trying to barge into the auditorium but if they’re happy with the monitors shouldn’t the staff be happy too? It’s quite embarrassing being late, you don’t need the staff making you feel worse. But some of the people who work at the ROH are very nice, it has improved a lot.
The ENO are a bit funny with late people too but they’re mostly okay. They do have people who don’t speak good enough English to help you with everything but that happened to me and the person just went and got someone who could understand. They need to get monitors though, you can’t have people standing up at the back for hours especially for things like Boris Godunov which doesn’t have an interval. But the staff are good apart from that, the box office people are really cool and there’s one guy who works in the foyer who’s always friendly and says hello to people he recognises. I have seen people getting treated really badly by staff here but not for a while so again major improvement.
The Barbican people are okay but there is one thing, they’ve got monitors which is great but the staff are always shouting at each other and sometimes it drowns out the sound from the monitors. Can’t they get walkie-talkies or something? Apart from that they’re okay, not overly friendly but not rude either and the box office people are some of the most helpful around.
I mostly like the Festival Hall people, they’re always really helpful They really know their music too, I’ve had some good chats with some of them. Sophie says the first aid people are nice and there’s a monitor in the first aid room so that’s good to know about.
But they do need find out basic things like when performances start and when the late entry point is. It’s no good saying it’s just started but they’ll let you in in 15 minutes when actually it started longer ago and you have to wait an hour and a half. If people know it’s that long they might be like, okay I’ll come to a different performance. But telling something that different is like taking their money under false pretences, I’m sure it was an accident and everything but it’s not the sort of thing you want to get wrong. And they need to give people the right discounts, if they give them the wrong one and you ask for the same thing again they can look at you a bit like, are you trying to get in cheap?
People go on about how the opera’s posh but it’s not really, you can wear what you like and people from all different classes go. It’s Cadogan Hall that’s the really snobby place. It’s okay but it’s the kind of place where you think you might knock something over and break it.
They need to sort out their latecomers thing, there’s no point in having the entry point five minutes after the start, it should be at least fifteen minutes really. But latecomers get their own room with a monitor and they’ve got a great sound system. Also if an opera’s 4 hours long you don’t start it at 7, people can miss trains that way. 6.30 is better or even 6. And we couldn’t find the programme seller, seriously none of us could, not all of us were there though. They need to sort it somehow so it’s a bit more obvious I reckon.
Wigmore Hall has nice staff but 1 thing they do is they won’t stop people from sitting in the wrong seat and then if someone shows up and wants their own seat the staff will try to put them somewhere else and I don’t think that’s really on – the rule is in most places and it’s probably true here as well, if there’s a seating problem you ask the staff to sort it. I understand if the staff don’t want to confront people but the seats are different prices, you don’t want to pay top price and end up sitting in lower price seats because someone’s nicked yours and if you need the aisle you can’t be shoved in the middle and like if you’ve got hearing problems it can change things a lot if you’re on the wrong side of the auditorium.
But the Wigmore staff are cool people, they’re always helpful in other ways and if you’re a little bit firm with them you can get them to give you the right seat or at least a seat you can sit in although if they do that you might get someone coming after you saying you stole their seat.
We had some trouble with Opera Holland Park staff being mean to Sophie but all sorts of nice people are mean to her because they don’t get her. Staff are being paid to help people so they should be more respectful than that but maybe she was being accidentally disrespectful too. Sophie might not like me saying that but she’ll probably agree with me and in a week or two when she’s calmed down she might even tell me I'm right to my face.
But seriously, I’ve never had a problem with them, they won the first two Primi Divi Awards for Best Staff for a reason and I reckon they’d have won it again last season if Sophie hadn’t had her problem. They’re friendly and helpful and they’ve actually been really kind to Sophie in other years. And The Boss is really cool, I’m not just saying that because he reads our stuff sometimes but if we’ve got a problem he's prepared to listen to our side of it and it’s like making the OHP experience a good one for every individual seems to be really important to him. One year I complained about the prices, next thing we knew he’d made them cheaper.
The Hackney Empire staff used to be great and the box office people still are but this time the ushers seemed a bit suspicious of me and Sophie although they were okay with the older people. What, do they think young people only go to the opera to smash it up???? Of course we don’t, we wouldn’t be able to hear the music if we did something noisy like that. The Milton Keynes people were a bit like that too, brilliant programme seller though who really went out of her way to help this guy who insisted on having a receipt.
I didn’t go to the Wolverhampton Grand this year but apparently people are still great and very nice to latecomers but instead of just taking them right in and taking them right to their seat which blocks the view of the people already in there it would be better to make them sit nearer the door they came in by and maybe wait for the next applause too. The Peacock Theatre people are always really friendly and even the box office people were chatting about La rondine like they actually knew something about it. Sadler’s Wells disappointed me though, how comes there weren’t any Glyndebourne performances? I was looking forward to seeing them there, it’s a really good theatre for opera and the staff who sell you the programmes and tickets and show you to your seat are always really cool.
And even though they’re not usually classical music places I’ve got to say the staff at the Duke of York’s Theatre, Gielgud Theatre and Piccadilly Theatre are definately 3 of the friendliest, the most helpful and the best at speaking English of them all. Once these girls got told off for taking photos but they even did that in a really nice way. So maybe the people who say opera houses are snobbier places than theatres have got a point but a lot of it’s to do with the staff, like I said the staff can have such a big impact on the experience you have.
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