Shut Opera House says union

BECTU has called for the Royal Opera House to be closed to enable repairs to backstage equipment.

The shut-down demand came in a letter, sent on January 24, from the union to Michael Kaiser, the ROH chief executive, after several performances were cancelled due to problems which the management described as "technical difficulties".

Back-stage union members had begun to complain that the official explanation for the cancellations could be interpreted as a criticism of their professionalism, while front of house staff were suffering high levels of abuse from disappointed audiences.

Most of the technical problems which had prevented performances going ahead were related to the computerised mobile pallets used to move scenery on and off stage. Automatic control systems have failed repeatedly since the refurbished Opera House re-opened in December, and without any facility for stage staff to manually over-ride the computer, this has usually led to scenery becoming stuck.

In the original plan for a grand re-opening, time had been allowed for an exhaustive technical run-up backstage, so that the complex new equipement could be fully tested and debugged while staff were trained to use it. However, much of this time was lost due to an over-run of the building work in the House, and the union now claims that the management's insistence on opening on schedule, has been a major contributory factor in the technical problems that have dogged the ROH ever since.

Because of these difficulties, most backstage staff have now worked more hours in the six months since July 1999 than they are expected to in an entire year.

A temporary shut-down, says BECTU, is the only long-term remedy for the ROH's backstage problems, and would allow the manufacturers of the scenery equipment an adequate maintenance period without being interrupted by performances.