Why have ENO cancelled L'Orfeo? Nobody could accuse ENO's Artistic Director John Berry of lacking ambition or ideas, and the announcement last April of his plans for the 2014-15 season offered a boldness and vision that provoked great admiration. Unfortunately, the numbers behind them just don't stack up. For decades, ENO has been floundering in murky financial waters, spending more than it earned and unable to draw sufficiently large audiences to its uneconomic base at the London Coliseum. Arts Council England has thrown out several life-belts, but last summer, strapped for cash itself, it turned hard-hearted and slashed the 2015-16 grant by a stonking 29 per cent (from £17.2 million per annum to £12.4 million), with demands that the company develop a new business model. Whether Berry or ENO's board had advance intimations that this cut was coming is unclear, but the upshot was that serious amounts of money needed to be made or saved at once, leaving the 2014-15 season no longer sustainable. Given disappointingly below-forecast returns from the box office this autumn, alarm bells began ringing with redoubled urgency, and Berry has now been forced to withdraw from (or at least indefinitely postpone) a collaboration with the Bristol Old Vic on a new production of, slated for next spring, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. All the scheduled performances, which would have taken place in Bristol, have been cancelled. One guesses that it was a toss-up whether to drop this or Tansy Davies" high-risk new opera Between Worlds. This is regrettable on several fronts. Contracted singers and production teams will now have to be paid off, to nobody else's gain, and the effect on company morale will be dire. The project would also have represented the first time that ENO had performed outside London for 15 years, thus giving credence to the company's otherwise dubious claim to be "National." But what is truly frightening is that ENO's ideas for making and saving money - a new restaurant and café in the Coliseum, productions of musicals which can be transferred to the West End, and the development of a new centralized and cost-reducing production, office and rehearsal centre - won't materialise until 2016 at the earliest. ENO is already a stripped-down organisation which doesn't have substantial reserves or assets to draw on, and banks have a nasty habit of getting antsy about loans. If the box-office doesn't pick up (and with stagings of "difficult" repertory in the offing, it well might not), will these remedial measures come too late?