Yahoo News Joanna Lumley on finding Grange Park Opera a new home and how the art form caught her in its web
Joanna Lumley is basking in the completion of a life-affirming building project that is close to her heart. Not, of course, the Garden Bridge over the Thames designed by Thomas Heatherwick, her long-term passion project that was dealt a severe blow in April when Mayor Sadiq Khan refused further funding on top of the £60 million already spent: we will come to that later.
Instead, this month the 71-year-old Ab Fab star attended the first performance of Verdi’s Tosca in The Theatre in the Woods, the new home of Grange Park Opera (GPO), at West Horsley in Surrey. The four-tier auditorium was commissioned and built with £10 million of private money within a year, after the company’s founder Wasfi Kani fell out with the owners of the Grange, the empty country house where she had built her first opera house in 1998.
Lumley was already a trustee of GPO — her husband, conductor Stephen Barlow, works with the company — and immediately stepped in as patron to help Kani find and build a new home. “There’s no room for manoeuvre with Wasfi when she comes upon you,” says Lumley. “She has a real energy, like a force of nature, so people say yes to her.”
Lumley downplays her own role, insisting she piggybacked on the fundraising efforts of Kani and the bass-baritone opera star Bryn Terfel. “If people saw my name next to theirs, perhaps they thought I was in good company, and trustworthy, if I was asking for money,” she says. Kani, on the other hand, says: “Joanna is extraordinarily intelligent and very big-hearted and she is always ready to press the flesh. Everyone wants to hang out with her. She brings people to a party. And she actually contributed to her own appeal, which is rather exceptional.”
The two have known each other for years and have much in common. Lumley was born in India, where her father commanded a Gurkha regiment. Kani was born in the East End of London to Muslim parents who had fled India at partition — her biography confidently claims that she is the only opera impresario who grew up with an outside toilet. “The strangest thing is, Wasfi found out recently that her mother, my mother, my sister, and me as a babe in arms, travelled back from Bombay in 1947 on the same boat, the Franconia,” says Lumley. “Talk about fate.”
Indeed, there does seem to be a hand of destiny working in GPO’s favour. When the company’s lease was terminated at the Grange, Kani was already committed to staging a 2017 season. “The opera world works five years in advance,” she says. “I had contracts. If I don’t have my festival, I still have to pay everyone.”
So a new venue had to be found. “It had to be within reach of London but we didn’t want to tread on anybody’s toes at Glyndebourne or Garsington or indeed the Grange,” Lumley says. (Both she and Kani put the split with their former landlords firmly in the past. “I keep away from all that because I can’t bear squabbles,” Lumley says.)
A friend of Kani’s pointed out that Bamber Gascoigne, the 81-year-old writer and former University Challenge host, had just inherited a dilapidated but historically important Tudor house from his aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe, and was looking to put it to artistic or community use. “How often do you meet a bloke who wants to give his house away?” says Kani.
The house is not only midway between Garsington and Glyndebourne, but also the transport hubs of Leatherhead and Guildford. “What sets my opera festival apart from others?” says Kani. “A train station a mile away. That’s it.”
Tim Reynolds Architects was appointed to design a building based on the auditorium of La Scala, and evoking a classical rotunda, with acoustics expert Raf Orlowski taking responsibility for the sound quality. Then there were visits to “the first digging of the sod” when the theatre was “a big hole in the ground with wet red iron rods sticking out”, then “that familiar horseshoe shape emerging” and later “the topping out, when it’s a bold skeleton with wind whipping and rain and a little tree tied to the top”.
The building is not yet finished. Indeed, the reason for our meeting is that Lumley is spearheading a second tranche of fundraising, to generate £3 million for final touches to the interior and exterior, decorating the boxes, and a lavatory block. Lumley is “obsessed with lavatories”, having last year, for a TV show, travelled through Japan “where frankly you want to move into their lavatories”.
Still, the basics are in place. Lumley’s husband, who will direct Die Walküre later in the season, after Janacek’s Jenufa and Bryn Terfel in concert, gave the acoustic the thumbs-up. That first performance of Tosca was, Lumley says, “so thrilling”, not least because it was also election night.
Jonathan Dimbleby took to the stage in black tie at the 10pm interval to announce the findings of the exit poll his brother David had just announced on BBC1. There were “massive cheers” when the predicted Labour seats were announced, which seems to buttress the belief of both Lumley and Kani that opera is no longer just for the super-rich or Tory grandees.
“The people who wrote operas wrote them for everybody,” says Lumley. “I would say to anybody, please go and see an opera. You can get cheap seats, you can read up about it in advance or in the programme on the night, there are surtitles so you will know what is going on. You won’t feel left out, that it’s odd or strange, and the more you know about it — like painting or cooking or motor racing — the more fascinating it becomes. It catches you in its web.”
Although she was always a huge fan of classical music, Lumley herself didn’t really get into opera until her second marriage, to Barlow, in 1986, when she was 40 (the same year, incidentally, that she finally got on the property ladder).
She is passionate in her belief that the arts should be supported by both private wealth and government funding as a life-enriching force, especially in today’s uncertain world, and says that if she were prime minister the first thing she would do would be to bring classical music teaching back into schools.
If you stood, I say, you’d probably win. “Oh, stop,” she cries. “You can rub that out because I can’t think of anything more punishing than being politics — in general but now in particular.” Brexit has “muddled the country completely” and “when there is too much chaos around we all feel ill, actually”.
This seems a good time to bring up the Garden Bridge. Is she angry at the Mayor for pulling the plug? “We were terribly crestfallen that such a generous and beautiful idea — a free bridge for people to walk in extreme beauty over the river, where you would get the best views of London — could take such a kicking,” she says. “We couldn’t imagine how so many obstacles could be put in the way deliberately to make it so difficult for us to proceed. It has been a pretty troubling year after three-and-a-half years of the hardest work that everyone was absolutely dedicated to.”
She felt “responsible” that the bridge was axed after the expense of so much money and effort, “because it was my idea”, but insists that “hundreds of thousands” of people supported it: “But their voices are held quiet and only the vociferous ‘antis’ are heard and relished.” She won’t be drawn further on Khan, who she has only met once, at Buckingham Palace, or on whether the bridge might yet be built. “I have been asked for the moment not to really say anything,” she says politely, “so if I could just leave that hanging…”
Lumley is not one to brood, though. There is the second phase of funding for The Theatre in the Woods to accomplish. She is finishing off a travel programme on India based on a six-week trip she did last year and there is a film, a possible sitcom and a trip to the champagne region of France with her friend and Ab Fab co-star Jennifer Saunders coming up.
Next year she may do another travel odyssey, along the Silk Road. “There are various routes you can take but I am fascinated with central Asia and the ’stans — Turkistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,” she says. “And I would like to take the golden road to Samarkand. I quite like a bit of rufty-tufty travel. You have got to be quite up for it but I am quite a good traveller. I like a kit bag and a rucksack.”
