Head over heels for daring production and titular lead

SALOME

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre

THE RISING OF THE MOON

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre

An older generation of readers may remember a TV catchphrase “I love it when a plan comes together”. When the plan is a great tragic opera and you can apply the phrase to it, the experience is almost overwhelming.

The current Irish National Opera production of Richard Strauss’s Salome was scheduled several years ago, but was derailed by Covid.

That gave the company the opportunity to stage the composer’s Elektra outdoors at Kilkenny Castle, so it wasn’t exactly a disaster. But back on track, and with Salome at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, the company offered an evening well within my top opera experiences of a lifetime.

Sinéad Campbell-Wallace. Sinéad Campbell-Wallace. Sinéad Campbell-Wallace: keep repeating the name of that now well-risen star soprano in a hugely demanding role that requires her to hold the stage almost throughout a piece without even an interval.

Further, in addition to a voice of Wagnerian power, she has the acting ability to convince an audience of a 16-year-old girl’s persona.

Director Bruno Ravella’s concept is 1950s style, the men costumed immaculately in white tie and tails, Salome a bouffant debutante until stripped to a shapeless shift for the dance sequence.

It’s wonderfully executed by Campbell-Wallace in Liz Roche’s suggestive choreography as tenor Vincent Wolfsteiner’s perfectly wheedling Herodes disintegrates repellently into ill-concealed quivering depravity, while staccato mezzo interjections come from the majestically gowned Imelda Drumm as the malign Herodias.

Strauss has left Herod as the dominant male force in his libretto, rather than the doomed Jochanaan (faithful to the Oscar Wilde play). But baritone Tómas Tómasson gives the Baptist the full, irritating intensity of an almost paranoid obsession. It’s a modern but deeply credible interpretation.

And the “theological debate” set piece between the Jews and the Nazarenes on the divinity or otherwise of the unseen Christ becomes a core narrative as well as musical template as a result.

Leslie Travers’s set design is all curving elegant simplicity as a canvas for his costuming, while a pond hints at salvation as the prophet baptises the uncomprehending Salome; but the pull of her newly awakened sexuality is too powerful: she will have him, alive or dead.

Fergus Sheil conducts the dramatically demanding score with perfect balance in a work that reminds us throughout that opera is the ultimate distillation of all the performing arts.

If the decade of remembrance has taught us anything, it should be that we have nothing to be dewy-eyed about in recollecting the years between 1916 and the establishment of the

Irish Free State. The facts have been emerging (they still are) into popular culture rather than being the province of academia. And they are anything but pretty.

A pointer to how we have always sanitised violent nationalism dates from 1907, and the first premiere at the Abbey of Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon. It’s a romantic political fairy tale with an escaped political felon on the run but trapped by the presence of a doughty RIC sergeant set to watch out for and prevent his escape by boat.

Not recognising the escaped prisoner for who he is, the sergeant is drawn into sentimental reminiscence of his childhood where ballads like The Rising of the Moon were part of daily life.

And song by song, the old life takes over enough for him to abandon the generous reward being offered for the capture of the prisoner.

What such choices would mean when “authority” became the opposing forces of the Free State Army and the IRA, was in the future when the play premiered. Romantic visions of a sovereign Ireland didn’t include the savage and merciless brutality of the Civil War.

Gregory’s vision made no account of hatred. But the play, staged at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, remains a charming, romantic period piece, directed by Eoghan Carrick with Oisín Thompson as the Man, Michael Tient as the RIC sergeant, and Molly Whelan as his constable.

The set is effectively designed by Chrysi Chatzivasileiou, with excellent lighting by Eoin Winning, although the costumes by Toni Bailey look more like 1970s Greece under the Colonels than Ireland in 1907.