Sideshow winner

I thought my 27th Wexford Opera Festival since 1972 was going to be one of the best. I had seen and enjoyed the Cilea and Chabrier operas on the bill at Holland Park and Opera North in the 1990s, and I was intrigued whether Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was viable music theatre. Wexford veterans are used to disappointment and surprise success. We know why Glyndebourne audiences go with the flow and enjoy themselves, there being dinner, gardens, atmosphere and ticket prices to dissolve criticism. Wexford is cheaper: €25 to €130 a night for the main operas, less for sideshows. But most visitors make a three-night excursion with b&b as minimum. In the old days, it was a drinking as well as an opera festival — a tradition started by Compton Mackenzie. Audiences were younger and more robust, too.

The old Theatre Royal where the festival started was characterful but uncomfortable. Its superb replacement, opened in 2008 just before the euro crisis, has a stunning auditorium, and terrific acoustics — as has its additional ‘black-box’ concert room. Pit and backstage areas are cramped, but it will remain the best theatre in Ireland for years. This year’s winning work, however, was not done here but round the corner in the hall at Presentation Secondary School, thanks to funding by Lord Magan of Castletown, who has presided over the restoration of the 1767 Palladian mansion Castletown Cox outside Kilkenny, described in the Kilkenny People as Ireland’s answer to the Taj Mahal.

Lennox Berkeley’s delightful 1954 comedy A Dinner Engagement was expressively accompanied on the piano by Adam Burnette, nicely designed by Kate Guinness, and directed without fuss or pretension by Caitriona McLaughlin, a theatre director from Donegal making her debut in opera.