This year, Wexford Festival Opera gave us theatre within theatre within theatre

The festival offers a complete experience for nerds and first timers alike.

As Pagliacci took his curtain call at the end of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s corpse-strewn masterpiece, his mum, immediately in front of me, plonk centre Row C in Wexford’s National Opera House, leapt to her feet, went nuts, whooping World Series halloos, waving her arms. 

Samuel White, the South Carolina American tenor who had just pulled off a stunning performance as Canio, the singer who portrays the Pagliacci clown betrayed by his wife, the murdered Nedda, nodded a brief acknowledgement, then got on with attending to the rest of the audience, who had by now largely followed Ma White’s lead.

Welcome to Wexford Festival Opera (WFO) 2024 and its Rosetta Cucchi devised theme, ‘Theatre within Theatre’. Ma White had doubled down. She was giving us theatre, within theatre, within theatre.

Pre-performance, I had spotted her ogling Samuel’s bio on her phone and politely asked what turned out to be the most otiose question of the decade. “Do you know him?” “Sure do.”

Sam was debuting in this Wexford Factory production. Mum and dad had flown over. Wexford Factory is a five-year-old initiative for young singers with Irish connections, giving them the opportunity to jump early into the refiner’s fire of the professional opera world. 

After six weeks or so of intensive training and masterclasses, performers deliver the goods onstage. This year there was the mainstage Pagliacci, Community Opera performances of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love at the Grain Store and 15 “Pop-Up” events, short tableaux mounted at various locations around the town. 

Cue spontaneous outbursts of opera from first floor windows in South Main Street. Most shoppers pause. Wexford is opera for everyone, the ambition of its founder in 1951, local GP Dr Tom Walsh. 

Community choruses are augmented by volunteers who man the wheels and cogs of the complex machinery making opera festivals work. Bars, Cloakrooms, Front of House, Green Room, Hospitality, Programmes, Wardrobe.

Over 400 Wexforders answer the call to the colours each year, fulfilling Walsh’s dream. Their cheery, helpful approach engenders loyalty. I have been a Wexford regular since 1978. In the bar of the Talbot Hotel, I bumped into Kay, who beat me by two years! 

Turned out we had both made the Wexford trek for the same reason. Enthusiastic columns in The Times by controversial polymath commentator of that era, Bernard Levin. Back in the day he was to be seen sweeping from Talbot Hotel to opera house in a dashing cloak, wielding a silver topped cane. 

This year, I bumped into old friend and parliamentary colleague, David Mellor, of Classic FM fame, covering the festival for the Daily Mail. Who knew the popular redtop boasted an opera critic? Two “pop up” critics in the one town. Who would have thunk it?

Three main stage operas on offer. As usual, they were unknown, at least to this writer. Recovering gems lost from the repertoire is Wexford’s forte. Sometimes they are reborn as regulars – Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, revived in 1952 – more often they are savoured, then tossed back into the opera stream.

First up, Pietro Mascagni’s Le Maschere, referring to the masks of the commedia dell’arte. The characters are Brighella, a travelling salesman, Dr Graziano, a lawyer, Columbina, Graziano’s maid in love with Brighella, Pantalone, a wealthy burgher, and his daughter Rosaura, in love with Florinda who is already promised by her scheming dad in marriage to the devilish Capitan Spavento, who has a servant, Arlecchino. 

Cut to the end. Courtesy of a magic potion. Rosaura and Florinda thwart all plots to keep them apart and Pantalone lets them marry if they can produce a beautiful Pantalocino/a within nine months. 

As Florinda has already got Rosaura up the duff and she looks as if her waters are about to break, this is hardly a challenge. Full synopsis and details – if you really need them – here. 

Mascagni achieved national fame for his 1890 verismo opera, Cavalleria rusticana, about the harsh realities of love life and vendetta in a Sicilian village. One opera wonder.

Le Maschere’s 1901 attempt to out-Donizetti Donizetti with potent elixirs, premiered simultaneously in seven opera houses across Italy, trying to stem the rising tide of Puccini mania. The opera was a floperoo. 

Wexford’s production, directed and designed by Stefano Ricci was the least appealing show this year. The setting, in a modern-day heath spa, simply did not work. All the players were swathed in towels and turbaned, making it impossible to tell one from another.

And the wicked “oldie” Capitan Spavento was more of a young hunk than the goofy Florinda. Ricci literally lost the plot. Rosaura got the wrong guy. 

Au contraire, no plot lost in Donizetti’s Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali.

 For any opera sceptic put off by the myth that the art form is distant and elitist, this is a “must see” introduction.   

The plot is a behind-the-scenes peek at what can go wrong with an opera production. Everything. The egos of the performers get in the way, better roles are demanded, deadlines are missed, the tenor finds himself in the wrong production, the SecondaDonna’s mother appears demanding a better role for her daughter, then decides to perform herself, taking over direction. 

Eventually the show collapses completely, the investors lose their money, and everyone flees. 

The libretto from Domenico Gilardoni is a goldmine of satire, one-liners, offering theatrical Aunt Sallys that even the least talented director could not fail to hit. 

In the determined hands of Orpha Phelan, an Irish director with the sharpest eye for the absurd I can recall, this mother lode of comedy was mined, its veins ruthlessly exploited, and sands sifted for every last nuance until the audience laughed itself to exhaustion and a rapturous series of curtain calls. 

“You had to be there”, is the resort of scoundrel critics unable to capture the complete impact of aperformance in words. And I hide behind it. Indescribable. I offer two examples. 

As the cast assembles, the Tenor pitches up, inappropriately carrying a guitar case and – spoiler alert – wearing an Alpine hat with a feather. He is greeted in an aside as “von Trapp”. Getting there? He calls his agent and is overheard shouting, “There are no Nazis, and I can’t find Maria anywhere”. 

The Sound of Music - just thought I should clarify for readers of limited musical experience – mistaken identity allusion became a running gag until the Tenor stumps off in disgust. 

I enjoyed the benefit of meeting Orpha for coffee before the performance, an experience as invigorating as the opera – and she alerted me to the “Don’t slip on the banana skin” moment. 

As Mama Agata, a drag role performed to Eddie/Suzy Izzard standards by Italian baritone Paulo Bordogna – what price trouser roles for mezzos? – a banana is eaten, the skin thrown down at his/her feet. “She’s going to slip on it! Oh, yes she is! Oh, no she doesn’t!” A neat sidestep, only to trip over the outstretched leg of a fellow cast member. 

Orpha told me that at the beginning of rehearsals many of the Italian cast simply didn’t clock the gags and she had to tell them, “No questions! Go with the flow. Questions for later.” By dress rehearsal time they got it. Best not to disagree.

Whatever, this production was a triumphant follow up to Orpha’s 2022 Lalla Roukh, in which she quirkily cast the narrator as a Wexford tramp with a shopping trolley, who wandered to and fro outlining the action. 

Well known Irish actor Lorcan Cranitch performed the role, one of the cleverest “framing devices” I have come across, countering the saccharine sweetness of the plot. 

Orpha told me that, for fun, trampy Cranitch took his shopping trolley and parked himself in a doorway on the High Street before performances, as operagoers flocked past. One evening he was amazed to be given a sympathetic €20 from a kindly Wexforder. Talk about playing yourself into the role.

Le convenienze, is, I think, another Donizetti revival from Wexford that will be scooped up by other houses. They had better take Orpha Whelan along for the ride. It is the detail and determination of her director’s eye that makes the production zing. 

And the music? Donizetti. Terrific – of course.

Then there is The Critic, by Irish composer, Charles Villiers Stanford, better known for his religious choral oeuvres. The libretto is from playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and their collaboration in this work, a take on the theatre and people who inhabit it through the medium of an opera in the final stage of rehearsals, is sublime satire. 

There are three narrative roles, Mr Puff, the promoter, Mr Sneer the critic and Mr Dangle the composer. Readers will grasp that an opera seria is not in prospect. They frame the staging of Dangle’s opera The Spanish Armada, interfering with the singers, discovering that the cast has gratuitously reshaped the action and generally exploiting all the harrumphing traits for which the profession is famous. 

The plot – there is a plot? (ed.) – can be found here. Nutshell. During the reign of Elizabeth I we are in Tilbury Fort where Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Christopher Hatton, Fort Governor are discussing the fate of Spanish prisoner Don Ferolo Wiskerandos, the enemy Admiral. 

Hatton’s daughter, Tilburina, enters. She has fallen in love with Wiskerandos who, yes, has enormous whiskers. Hatton’s and Raleigh’s nieces are also inconveniently in love with Wiskerandos. An English sea captain challenges the Spanish Admiral to a comically staged duel and kills him, but not before Wiskerandos delivers a subtle stab at one of Stanford’s English contemporaries. “It was the parry that killed me!” Hubert Parry 1848 – 1918.

Conor Hanratty, the Irish director who spent two years in Japan studying with Ninagawa Yukio, exploited his experience with the kabuki tradition to the full. The matching of gesture to libretto, down to the cocking of Mr Puff’s self-assured peri-wigged head and akimbo stance made the most of the very funny Sheridan words.

The Critic was the most “important” of Wexford’s mainstream operas this year. Self-deprecatory humour is powerful when archly deployed. Stanford’s music was, as to be expected, inspiring and the allusions to his other works, such as Songs of the Fleet, apt in the circumstances of Tilbury.

A concluding “mad” scene when Tilburina loses her marbles over the death of Wiskerandos – was pure Lucia di Lammermoor. Humorous cross references in a satirical work always hit the mark.

It is unusual for Wexford to stage three comic operas in a single season and comment was to be heard around the town – at least in the bars – that leavening with one seria production might have provided better balance. 

What the hell! No griping. Rosetta Cucchi, the festival’s indomitable director, presented a barnstorming festival. 

With its burgeoning accompanying lectures, concerts, street theatre and Wexford Factory events, the 16 days of Wexford Festival Opera offer a complete experience for nerds and first timers alike.

Small wonder that even mums from South Carolina make the pilgrimage to Ireland’s magical town.