Next Royal Ballet chief is smiling insider Kevin O'Hare

There were apparently unanimous whoops of joy inside the Royal Ballet this morning, even as brows were wrinkling perplexedly outside, when it was announced that the likeable No 2, administrative director Kevin O’Hare, will succeed director Dame Monica Mason next year. The smiling insider is to head a team involving two of the world’s leading choreographers, Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, which holds out the promise of a gold-plated twin-track creative approach uniting both classical and modern. With imminent budget cuts looming, this might be more of a gilt-plated reality, but still, if the personalities gel and Wheeldon and McGregor create several new works for London, the Royal Ballet will be the envy of the world.

Though the appointment will have disappointed those who had hoped the articulate and stylish 1990s Royal Ballet star Bruce Sansom would win the job, O’Hare, 45, a former principal dancer with Birmingham Royal Ballet, is known as both thoroughly approachable and a temperate and effective manager. If it looks a safety-conscious appointment in that respect, there are less visible assets here, I think. Not least, he will face money and political problems that more visionary types and those without knowledge of the inside tracks would have a hard time with.

His background at Sadler’s Wells/Birmingham means he has less of the Covent Garden hothouse about him, and more of the realistic touring outlook that knows the value of what’s in the production cupboards and won’t be afraid to rummage in some of the Royal Ballet’s more interesting past. The promised troika involving the stellar creative pair McGregor and Wheeldon answers some doubts about the "artistic" side of the appointment, but at the moment this is window dressing whose substance will only slowly emerge.

Among the candidates up for this hotly desired job were plenty of former Royal Ballet names, including Bruce Sansom, Scottish Ballet director Ashley Page, ENB's Wayne Eagling and Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, aka the Ballet Boyz. Both McGregor and Wheeldon were advocated, and it has long been thought that current dancing stars Johan Kobborg and Tamara Rojo would be on the list of potentials. There were also candidates from abroad.

However, these are sobering times - 2012-13, the new director's first year, would be a tough, hard road as the Royal Opera House faces the first of three years where 15 per cent will be cut from its budget: £2.1 million to be trimmed next year alone. Hard heads who could answer all the questions about making the best of a bad job would be likely to win out.

O'Hare has made swift, smiling progress through company management since stopping dancing in his early thirties, from apprenticeship with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then into his former company BRB and on to the Royal Ballet, entering Covent Garden as the company manager in 2001. Appointed administrative director in 2009, he has seen the upheavals from inside of dancer rebellion against Monica Mason’s predecessor, the late Ross Stretton, the changes in entertainment technology and the recent formidable political whirlpools.

While O'Hare was not a great dancer stylist in his time - and certainly much of the world will be saying, "Kevin who?" - he should have answers to calls for the Royal Ballet to renew its classical productions and take greater advantage of its most creative periods past and present. The question of the Royal Ballet’s accessibility to the rest of the nation - currently being handled mainly by electronic screen transmissions - may seem to O’Hare, after his itinerant career with BRB, better answered by physically getting the RB out on the road. Many of us would hope so.

RB directors: Norman Morrice (1977-86), Sir Anthony Dowell (1986-2001), Ross Stretton (2001-2), Dame Monica Mason (2002-12)

The appointment committee, finally revealed today, showed that the Royal Opera House did not repeat the mistake it made over the Stretton appointment by using a very small panel. This time there were six, though eyebrows might be raised that only one of them, former Sadler’s Wells and Birmingham Royal Ballet chief Sir Peter Wright (and O'Hare's former boss), was from ballet. However, it looks as if Wright's view was strongly influential. Two, David Clementi and Robert Wallace, are board members from the financial world, National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and composer Michael Berkeley are also both ROH board members, while CEO Tony Hall made up the six.

I'd infer from it that a known ability to function corporately as a manager in today’s anxious climate counts for more than, say, a powerful balletic personality or creative vision. The RB job is no longer termed "artistic director". Appointments such as Rudolf Nureyev’s at the Paris Opera, or even of major choreographers such as the Royal Ballet’s former directors Sir Kenneth MacMillan and Sir Frederick Ashton, seem unlikely in the present climate. It would not have gone unnoticed that two of today's top world choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky at the Bolshoi and Wheeldon with his own company Morphoses, found artistic directorship hell, and both gave it up to return to choreography. However, the fact that both Wheeldon and McGregor have been nominally brought into the leadership (though their roles are undefined yet) looks like a very deft and forward-thinking piece of lateral thinking - presuming that it has substance under the good PR.

I gather O'Hare is already working on his first season, which will be announced next spring. It will be a while before clarification emerges of his contracted term and how exactly Wheeldon and McGregor will fit into long-range planning. One priority for him will surely be to identify new performers to succeed the golden generation of stars now in their late thirties and forties - Carlos Acosta, Tamara Rojo, Johan Kobborg, Leanne Benjamin - who have brought lustre to Covent Garden worldwide despite a rather lacklustre selection of repertoire. These are people who understand the aura, daring and personal obligations of being major artists. If rep shrinks further with funding cuts, Covent Garden is going to need stars more than ever.

O’Hare will know his priorities - my own list of requests would be:

• Give the internationally sourced RB dancers a truly refined, unified and vital classical style
• Put heat under choreographic, musical and theatrical experiments - let idiosyncrasy flourish
• Set a yearly quota of new creations with a ring-fenced budget
• Rummage in the heritage production cupboards to rediscover creative gems of past repertoire
• Renew classics with genuinely large production vision and piercing attention to detail in the dancing, starting with Swan Lake and The Nutcracker
• Take the Royal Ballet out on national tour
• Ask what the Royal Ballet School is doing to prepare students for its mother company
• Stop worrying about money and just get out there and find a way for one of the richest classical companies in the world to demonstrate ballet’s potential as a risky, vagabond, delectable, old-and-new theatrical art form. Ballet is created for the public to dream with, not to please company managers and boards.

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