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Friday 9 January 2009

Wexford winner

Tom Sutcliffe on the new opera house in Wexford, Ireland

The Irish government has spent €27 million on a stunning new opera house in Wexford, which is having a flawless and crisis-free baptism in the current opera festival there. The old Theatre Royal was knocked down in November 2005, and the money the festival managed to raise was just €6 million of the €33 million total building cost. But the architects Ciaran McGahon, from the Irish Office of Public Works, and the British theatre specialist Keith Williams have squeezed an almost 800-seat house on to the old site — expanded by the addition of the neighbouring area formerly occupied by the Wexford People newspaper printworks.

So the theatre is still right in the heart of the town, approached along the familiar narrow terraced streets, its tall flytower challenging the nearby Pugin spires. And the facilities backstage are grand, as they say, making the festival diet of three operas run in tandem no longer a miracle but just a strain, while the foyers into which the three tiers of seating flow are generous and comfortable and the bars on the upper floors offer sublime views out to the Irish Sea and around the countryside.

There is even a second small auditorium seating 175 which matches the stage acting area and doubles as a rehearsal space, while the bars also turn into rehearsal studios. The acoustic of the main house (masterminded by Arup), with orchestra pit lifts and adaptable baffles that can be fine-tuned, is as warm and musically perfect in the stalls as in the circle. The plenum-based air conditioning is totally silent, seats are of comfortable blue leather, and the auditorium is both lined and partly constructed with richly grained American black walnut wood — as are the foyers. The orchestra lifts can extend the forestage or enable extra seating for spoken theatre to stretch right up to the proscenium, bringing total capacity to 854.

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