My Wexford Years

I was lucky enough to go to the old opera house at Wexford, in a converted cinema, about twelve years ago. This morning I’d like to introduce you to Margaret Tinsley who can claim with justification to be a genuine Wexford veteran and is a welcome Guest Blogger.

My Wexford Years

I was introduced to Wexford Festival Opera by my mother in 1968. We saw two operas, Guonod’s Roméo et Juliette and Rossini’s Otello. We also attended an opera talk at White’s Hotel, North Main Street, still resembling the coaching inn which it had been for something approaching two hundred years, and nothing like its subsequent soulless incarnation. Although I had been to mainstream opera in Dublin, I recognised something special in Wexford and couldn’t wait to return under my own steam. I did so five years later and have attended every year but one since then.
My memories of the old Theatre Royal are that it was intimate, cramped and uncomfortable but was the scene for many excellent operatic experiences, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1976), Handel’s Orlando (1980) and Mozart’s Zaide (1981) being but a few. Spontini’s La vestale (1979) will not be easily forgotten. I was there on the night the production almost hit the buffers thanks to the sharply raked stage having been stripped of the surface designed to stop the singers from slipping – supposedly lemon juice or lemonade. One by one and sometimes in groups they slipped, skidded and slid down towards the orchestra pit. They then had the unenviable and near impossible task of trying to get back up the slippery slope. The cast kept singing, the orchestra kept playing and the audience – well, the audience kept laughing and have been talking about it ever since. Bernard Levin described the debacle in greater and more colourful detail in his book Conducted tour.

Fast forward to this year’s festival

Christopher has posted expansively on two of this year’s operas. Alan and I also attended Willam Bolcom’s Dinner at Eight.
The opera is set in 1930s Manhattan with a society hostess planning a dinner party. We, the audience, are privy to the complications in the lives of her prospective guests – affairs, serious health problems, shady business practices, bankruptcy, suicide. The hostess, Millicent Jordan, has to face the fact that her main dish, lobster in aspic, has been dropped, and that her guests of honour cancel at short notice – this is the dinner party from hell!
The set and costumes captured time and place perfectly and Tomer Zvulun’s direction had a seamless quality. Bolcom’s music with its jazz undertones and clever musical references ‘told the story’, as one of our guests put it, without much depth for me but ably rendered under the baton of Wexford Festival’s artistic director, David Agler. Singing was uniformly good throughout with standout performances from Mary Dunleavy (the hostess) and Stephen Powell (her husband) and some fine ensemble singing although the libretto could be a tad trying. At one point I glanced down at the festival programme on my lap and was more than taken aback when I looked up again to find that the opera had ended. There was no climactic ending. Those guests who turned up simply went in to dinner and the doors closed behind them…. Dinner at Eight was starting without us!
William Bolcom joined the cast on stage during the final curtain call – the first time I’ve seen a composer of an opera I’ve just seen which may say more about my operatic tastes than anything else.
This year’s festival ‘nugget’ was for me the Dr Tom Walsh lecture, named for one of the festival’s founders. It was, in fact, a talk and recital by the renowned baritone Sir Thomas Allen, with accompanist Stephen Higgins, taking us through his life in music. He captivated his audience in St Iberius Church with his wit, charm and still glorious voice.
Any day now we should know what delights await us in 2019.

Margaret Tinsley, October 2018.