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When Opera Comes to Town Wexford
National Opera House
10/19/2026 - & October 24*, 26, 29, 2026
Alberto Caruso: The First Festival (World premiere)
Eilís Dexter*/Rachael Conaghan (Betty), Deirdre Higgins/Catherine Hooper*/Eiméar Harper (Bernadette), Sean Tester (Brian), Timothy Mays*/Cuan Durkin (Aidan), Olha Palazhchenko*/Yasmin O’Reilly (Mildred), Eva Maria Kavanagh*/Eadaoin Hassett (Laura), Yu Shao (Gianni), Fraser Robinson*/Matthew Mannion (Facundo), Tony Brennan (Night janitor)
Wexford Factory, Andrew Synnott (conductor)
Conor Hanratty (stage director), Frances White (costumes), Paolo Bonapace (lighting)
(© Padraig Grant)
What happens when opera arrives in a small Irish town and turns everyday life upside down? That is the delightful premise of The First Festival, a new one‑act opera by composer Alberto Caruso and librettist Colm Tóibín, commissioned to mark the seventy‑fifth anniversary of Wexford Festival Opera.
Set in October 1951, the year of the festival’s founding, the work imagines how the arrival of international opera singers might have disrupted the romantic lives of local residents. Rather than recounting the institution’s history, Tóibín and Caruso offer a comedy of love, loneliness, cultural encounters and unexpected romantic possibilities.
The action revolves around four clerks at the Wexford County Council Motor Taxation Office and four visiting opera singers, whose entanglements bring the contrast between provincial routine and theatrical glamour into comic relief. Yet the distinction is less clear‑cut than it first appears. The clerks may seem awkward and inexperienced, their visitors worldly and self‑assured, but neither group is immune to loneliness or unfulfilled desire.
Brian, a gay office clerk portrayed by tenor Seán Tester, speaks no foreign languages, while his Argentine love interest, baritone Fraser Robinson, speaks no English. Yet the two hit it off. Aidan, sung by baritone Timothy Mays, another clerk, is a gauche young man with little success among the local girls; nevertheless, he scores with Laura, an Italian soprano sung by Maria Kavanagh, herself weary of affairs with Italian men. Betty, a mezzo‑soprano portrayed by Eilís Dexter, is a lesbian with scant prospect of finding a local woman willing to defy the conventions of the day. She dreams instead of being swept off her feet by one of the visiting opera folk, chorus master Mildred, sung by Ukrainian mezzo Olha Palazhchenko. Finally, Bernadette, sung by Catherine Hooper, falls for an operatic stereotype in the person of Gianni, an insufferably narcissistic tenor portrayed by China’s Yu Shao.
Tóibín, one of Ireland’s leading novelists, brings a particularly personal perspective to the commission. Born in nearby Enniscorthy, he first encountered Wexford Festival Opera as a student attending a dress rehearsal of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles in 1971 and has maintained a close association with the festival ever since. His imaginative reconstruction of the excitement its arrival might have stirred among the townspeople avoids reducing either the locals to provincial caricatures or the visiting artists to embodiments of superior sophistication. Both are romantically frustrated, vulnerable to disappointment and susceptible to the prospect of change. The comedy is affectionate rather than judgemental, allowing the characters’ desires to speak for themselves against the social conventions of the period.
Caruso, born in Trento and based in Rome, is a composer, pianist and conductor whose work encompasses opera, film and theatre. He studied at Rome’s Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia and Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, pursued further studies in composition and conducting, and studied with Carlo Maria Giulini. A scholarship also took him to Japan to explore traditional and contemporary music, broadening his artistic horizons.
His previous operatic collaborations with Tóibín include The Master, presented at Wexford in 2022, and Lady Gregory in America, premiered there in 2024. Their latest undertaking benefits from an established artistic partnership: Tóibín understands the exigencies of the operatic stage, while Caruso is accustomed to shaping a score around the demands of dramatic text.
The music combines lyrical romanticism with brisk comic rhythms, its proportions well suited to the work’s hour‑long duration and ensemble-driven structure. Frequent quotations from La bohème, Tosca, Carmen, Rigoletto and other repertory staples offer knowing amusement to seasoned operagoers while keeping the proceedings accessible to newcomers. The challenge is to ensure that the music does more than punctuate the jokes. The characters’ emotional discoveries require expressive substance of their own, and the most successful moments are those in which sincerity and humour coexist without either being sacrificed to the other.
The commission also provides a valuable opportunity for the Wexford Factory artists, whose young singers are presented with a work tailored to their needs. Rather than offering a succession of familiar arias, it demands ensemble discipline, characterisation and the ability to sustain a theatrical narrative. The performers must function as a company, their individual contributions serving the larger comic design.
Stage director Conor Hanratty keeps the emphasis on the romantic entanglements and the comic collision between office routine and operatic extravagance. The production depends on the ensemble’s ability to sustain the farce without overplaying it: the characters’ earnestness is what makes their predicaments amusing. The young performers’ physical commitment and comic timing are central to the work’s success, as is their ability to temper exuberance with deadpan restraint.
Hanratty’s comic timing is admirable. He elicits frequent bursts of laughter without forcing the humour or lapsing into slapstick or vulgarity. One particularly delicious moment, worthy of the great film director Ernst Lubitsch, occurs when the night janitor, portrayed by Tony Brennan, makes a brilliantly timed entrance to discover four pairs of lovers in flagrante delicto. Priceless!
An element of institutional nostalgia is inevitable in a work celebrating its own festival. Yet The First Festival avoids the conventions of an anniversary pageant by focusing on the lives that might have been altered by the institution’s arrival. Its modest scale and farcical plot make no claim to the complexity of a full‑length opera. Its appeal lies instead in affectionate local observation, knowing operatic humour and a fond portrait of a community encountering an unfamiliar world.
As a seventy-fifth-anniversary commission, The First Festival offers an apt reflection on Wexford’s own history. Tóibín and Caruso have fashioned an entertaining theatrical celebration that looks beyond institutional commemoration to the people who give a festival its life. It also offers Wexford’s emerging singers a welcome opportunity to demonstrate their versatility, not merely as vocalists but as members of an accomplished theatrical ensemble.
Ossama el Naggar
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