If Raymond Gubbay has his way the perennial coach party problem on the Strand is only going to get worse. From now until June, eight times a week, Mr Gubbay will be staging those twin crowd pleasers The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro at the Savoy Theatre. Top price: £49.50. Such an egalitarian approach to the sport of queens has naturally met with snorts of derision from the usual musical mafia. How perfectly horrid: a lot of ghastly oiks who think a Rossini is a strawberry flavoured cocktail applauding in all the wrong places and humming along to the arias. And not a stone’s throw from the sacred Royal Opera House itself, too. It’s worse than Classic FM.

So far, preview audiences at the Savoy have been respectable, but nowhere near capacity. Nevertheless, the opera world is as skittish as a first-night diva. If he succeeds, Mr Gubbay will change the map of opera in the capital. His strategy is to produce mainstream productions for entertainment. He is not seeking to advance the cause of opera as an art form, merely to offer West End audiences an alternative to The Lion King.

This is precisely what so infuriates his critics. They believe that opera is meant to be inaccessible Art, and as such should not be sullied by trifling considerations like enjoyment and profit. It should certainly not be thought of in the same category as something as low grade as musical theatre. High ideals indeed, and ones that require the luxury of large subsidies to sustain them. Yet it is the same purists who ran the House into the ground, fostering a stifling culture of elitism on the way. It is thanks to them that most Britons think opera is for highly-strung toffs in penguin suits, whose £170 tickets are subsidised by those earning not much more than the minimum wage.

If the opera snobs could see beyond the bottom of their champagne flutes, they would support Mr Gubbay. If he pulls this off, the heavyweights will no longer be hamstrung by the popular works they secretly despise. Mr Gubbay will take care of the Carmens and the Traviatas, while they will be free to deploy their grants in the interests of new opera as well as continuing to provide a showcase for those works in the established repertoire which do not fit naturally into a commercial environment such as the Savoy. Such an effective division of labour could help to revive an art form that is, under the current arrangements, slowly suffocating.

Of all the subsidised companies, only Opera North has understood this. Its current season of eight short pieces is precisely the sort of creative fix opera needs to get it to the next stage. Covent Garden should look to Leeds for inspiration, and to the Savoy for a much-needed reality check.