Wexford Festival: The Critic
National Opera House (O’Reilly Theatre), Wexford; 24/10/2024
Orchestra and Chorus of Wexford Festival Opera; Ciarán McAuley (conductor); Tony Brennan (bass); Rory Dunne (bass-baritone); Gyula Nagy (baritone); Ben McAteer (baritone); Oliver Johnston (tenor); Rory Lynch (tenor); Meilir Jones (bass-baritone); Dane Suarez (tenor); Andrew Henley (tenor); Ava Dodd (soprano); Hannah O’Brien (soprano); Carolyn Holt (mezzo-soprano); Mark Lambert (actor); Jonathan White (actor); Arthur Riordan (actor); Olga Conway (actor).
In this second report from the Wexford Festival Opera, I cover the performance of 24th October of Charles Villiers Stanford’s 1916 comic opera, ‘The Critic, or an Opera Rehearsed’, an operatic reworking of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1779 satirical farce ‘The Critic’. In this a rehearsal of a play, ‘The Spanish Armada’, set in Tilbury at the time when the Spanish fleet is anticipated and Elizabeth I makes her famous speech (not included in the play, is attended by a critic, Mr Sneer, again exemplifying the theme of this year’s Festival, ‘Theatre Within Theatre’. Ciarán McAuley conducted and Conor Hanratty directed. Sets were by John Comiskey, costumes by Massimo Carlotto, while the lighting was designed by Daniele Naldi.
In the opera, Sneer (Arthur Riordan), the playwright/librettist Puff (Mark Lambert), the composer Dangle (Jonathan White) and the under-prompter Hopkins (Olga Conway) are all spoken roles. Some of the humour comes from the attempts by Puff to intervene in the rehearsal action to correct mistakes (many his own), the exasperation of Dangle at the numerous cuts actioned by the performers, and the comments by Sneer which could be taken as innocuous at face value but seem ironic and insincere. A huge amount of the humour derives from the preposterously puffed-up text of the libretto, with failed plagiarism of Shakespeare. A ludicrously unrelated brief secondary plot, where a Justice and his wife are reunited with their long-lost son (Welsh tenor Andrew Henley), who appears as a defendant before the court, whereupon all faint and then revive. A chorus of knights pledge allegiance to England in her hour of need, kneeling, then point out that the script lacks instructions for their exit. Puff suggests they exit while still kneeling, prompting a chorus mutiny, averted by allowing them to stand instead. When a Spaniard is killed and expires in the middle of a word ‘etern-‘, his killer completes with “-ity is what he would have said”, the silliness amplified by the scene needing repeated, the ‘corpse’ wandering off in boredom and the following scenes featuring arias addressed to the empty space. In one scene, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh (Irish bass Tony Brennan), makes a slow stately solemn entrance, sits in a seat, looks pensive, while solemn music plays suggesting an imminent solo, whereupon he stands up and slowly exits without singing a note. A scene depicting the fidelity of the Thames (initially MES THA on the pikes of two halberdiers before they are rearranged by an irate Puff) to the Crown involves wavy fabric depicting the river with models of galleons on the heads of all-too-visible extras moving choreographically between, plus a whale, a giant octopus and, belatedly after the fabric has exited, an anchor. The parody of the pretentiousness of theatrical tropes is hilarious, all the more so because it is played absolutely straight. Nothing mocks second-rate theatre more effectively than portraying how seriously it takes itself. The action is almost painfully funny.
Music that matches and amplifies the ludicrousness of the libretto would be a tall order for many a composer, but Stanford is in his element, the credit or blame displaced to Dangle. The ‘overture’ is merely the cacophony of the orchestra tuning (tentatively praised by Sneer for its avant-garde boldness). Emboldened by Puff’s plagiarism of Shakespeare, he confesses to borrowings from ‘the classics’. The opening of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth was hard to miss, and I noticed a quotation from Offenbach’s ‘Tales of Hoffman’, but I am sure there were other ‘quotations’, including a very Wagnerian Fate motif. A preposterous hymn to Mars sung by the chorus of knights with Sir Walter Raleigh (Northern Irish baritone Ben McAteer) and Sir Christopher Hatton (covered by Irish tenor Rory Lynch) featured the melody of ‘Auld Land Syne’ in the minor key. The love heroine (comically named Tilburina - Irish soprano Ava Dodd) is the daughter of the Governor of Tilbury Fort (Irish bass-baritone Rory Dunne, who also plays the Justice in the court scene) and has fallen in love with a Spanish prisoner held there, the improbably-named Don Ferolo Whiskerandos (American tenor Dane Suarez). Her hilariously overblown love aria is full of lists of synonyms, garden herbs, birds, etc., and Stanford cannot resist birdsong imitation in the winds, quite beautiful yet mockingly parodic in context. The duet of doomed farewell of the lovers is equally hyperbolic and comical. A rival for Tilburina’s affections, a gentleman disguised as a Beefeater (Hungarian baritone Gyula Nagy), commences a love aria, but has to rush away before he can finish it. The nieces of Raleigh and Hatton (Irish soprano Hannah O’Brien and mezzo Carolyn Holt), who are also in love with Don Ferolo, are caught in sword point Mexican standoff with the Don, eventually leading to his murder by the Beefeater, about which they seem remarkably unperturbed. Stanford’s music in the opera is full of moments of Brahmsian beauty, interspersed with enough silliness to make one wonder who the ultimate butt of the joke is: perhaps the audience?
In conclusion, this is a truly hilarious production doing more than justice to a neglected gem of comic opera. Full marks from me.
Photo credit: Patricio Cassinoni