From ‘summer camp’ to a beefy 18-day festival

By Jim Hayes

The RTÉ archives have some fascinating glimpses into Wexford Festival Opera’s past, among them a scratchy, hissy recording from the first festival in 1951.

In it, Scottish tenor Murray Dickie, waiting in the wings before taking the Theatre Royal stage as King Carlos of Spain in Michael William Balfe’s ‘The Rose of Castile’, is asked by a chatty Norris Davidson if his part is ‘very tricky’.

‘You could scarcely call Balfe’s operas tricky,’ says Dickie. ‘They are just a collection of very nice melodies, occasionally strung together rather carelessly, I think. He had more a gift for melody than he had a gift for operatic situation, or perhaps he had the gift but didn’t bother to use it.

‘It wasn’t required in those days as it is now.’

History does not tell us if Dr Tom Walsh and the festival founders agreed with Dickie’s assessment of Balfe (who lived in Wexford as a child) but his parting comment could almost serve as a slogan for a festival that has grown and developed as required, and moved with the times as times demanded.

And for that we can be very grateful.

We’ll never know for sure, but the old Theatre Royal festival would almost certainly have struggled to come out the other side of our most recent economic crash. Yes, it had a make-do charm, and that ‘postage stamp’ stage that so beguiled visiting writers, but it was not a purpose-built opera house and lacked capacity.

Even now we should be thankful for the vision of people like the late Jerome Hynes and their future-proofing decision to tear down the Theatre Royal and start again, from scratch.

In another of those films from the RTÉ archive, from 2001, Nationwide’s Michael Ryan speaks with David Agler, then with Vancouver Opera, now artistic director of Wexford Festival Opera.

On the Theatre Royal, Agler points to ‘the difficulties of the place... very uncomfortable for the orchestra’.

‘It’s like going to summer camp, and it makes one hardy,’ he says, with a smile.

It’s safe to assume the summer camp was buried in the rubble of the old Theatre Royal. And while staging an international festival in Wexford still has its challenges, the venue is not chief among them.

Having slimmed to survive in the lean years, Wexford Festival Opera is this year not only back to the beefy 18 days and nights of 2008, it’s also a near-sellout.

The programme on offer is arguably among the festival’s best yet, from an opera made famous by Maria Callas and directed by Fiona Shaw (Medea) to the ShortWorks premiere of Andrew Synnott’s Dubliners, featuring the composer himself at the piano.

So roll on Thursday night’s fireworks and the start of the 66th festival. Bigger and better, Wexford is back with a bang.