Irish National Opera still offering a hefty bang for funding buck

Theatre preview

Amy Ní Fhearraigh stars in Least Like the Other

Emer O'Kelly

January 15 2023 02:30 AM

The performing arts are the most expensive. They are also the most productive in terms of bang for your buck. This coming year the Irish taxpayer gives €130 million to the arts, the third year it’s been at that level. In 2020 the figure was €80m, so things could be said to be looking up.

They are certainly looking up for opera. Irish National Opera (INO) will receive €3.2m in funding for its fifth year of operation. Only The Abbey, as the national theatre, will receive more (€8m). And Wexford Festival Opera will receive €1.6m. Music also features in another of the big ‘winners’ as the splendid Irish Chamber Orchestra will receive €1.24m.

Funding, always inadequate to meet demand, is a difficult balancing act, particularly in a country where it can rightly be claimed that literature is our core national artform, but its production is solitary and therefore a ‘cheap’ occupation.

But back to this year’s allocation. INO has been on the go for only five years, and its establishment required a long, hard-fought battle. Wexford frequently features on international awards lists of opera festivals around the world, but it is in a niche category within the opera firmament.

INO, on the other hand, under its tenacious artistic director Fergus Sheil, has been determined from the start to live up to its title.

When the National Opera House in Wexford grew out of the rebuilding of the much-loved but highly limiting Theatre Royal, there were mumblings that it should have been in Dublin. It is undoubtedly a national shame that there is no dedicated opera house in our capital city, but that is a different issue.

And for Sheil, ‘national’ means what it says. He has made it clear that opera audiences shouldn’t have to make a night out into a weekend/overnight trek. And from the start, touring nationwide has been a major part of the company’s programme, with productions planned and adapted for less than perfect venues, frequently with less than perfect acoustics. The result, anecdotally, has been packed houses.

Even the pandemic didn’t stop the march. In Europe and further afield, when many companies folded their tents, the opera world was buzzing with INO’s inspired staging of 20 Shots of Opera.

This was a series of 20 short pieces specially commissioned from various composers and staged digitally with Hugh O’Conor as the overall co-ordinating director (he also directed several of the pieces). It began with Beethoven bitching about the laundress wrecking his shirts and socks, and remained inspired throughout.

And 2023 begins tonight, when INO will take to Covent Garden’s Linbury stage. They are bringing a revival of their 2019 co-production with Galway International Festival of Brian Irvine’s and Netia Jones’s short, fascinating, even inspiring Least Like the Other.

The work traces the horror of Rosemary Kennedy’s treatment at the hands of her family. The sister of John F Kennedy, she was committed to a mental institution by her family, lobotomised in her 20s, and lived incarcerated until her death in 2005.

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The role of Rosemary will be sung by Amy Ní Fhearraigh, with Ronan Leahy and Stephanie Dufresne in the speaking roles.

Orpha Phelan’s dazzling production of Donizetti’s wicked comic masterpiece Don Pasquale will resume its tour of Ireland this month, starring bass Graeme Danby, and tenor Rhodri Prys Jones replacing Patrick Kabongo as Ernesto. It finishes in Siamsa Tíre in February.

Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier will take to the stage of the Bord Gáis Energy theatre in March. It star-features three Irish sopranos: Paula Murrihy in the trouser role of Octavian, Celine Byrne as Marschallin and Claudia Boyle as Sophia, and Sheil himself conducting.

With a cast of 28 soloists as well as chorus, INO is also a great employer, as well as feeding audience appetites.

In April and May Massenet’s Werther will tour, with a new orchestration by Richard Pierson with Paride Catalado as Werther and Niamh O’Sullivan as the tragic Charlotte.

And the summer season will hit the boards in May, with Mozart’s ever popular Così Fan Tutte beginning a tour in Wexford, which will include a week at the Gaiety in Dublin. Again, opportunity is knocking: the lead roles are all being shared, two singers to each, while Peter Whelan and Elaine Kelly will share the conductor’s baton.