Report: Glasthule Opera

The Glasthule Opera shows in Dún Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre last week were as good as you could expect them to be, given the fact that the venue is far from ideal, the lack of funding, and consequent limits on rehearsal time.  Marketed as a professional season and reviewed as such (you can see Michael Dervan’s reviews from the Irish Times here and here), this was really more a pair of DIT Conservatory of Music graduate shows, strangely complementing OTC’s current employment of RIAM undergraduates in Acis and Galatea.  Like the late Bernadette Greevy’s Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, Glasthule is the brainchild of DIT’s Anne Marie O’Sullivan, and as it was with Greevy and her festival, Glasthule’s existence owes a great deal to O’Sullivan’s own personal investment, as well as the great loyalty of her current and past pupils.  Sensibly, though, O’Sullivan and Glasthule Opera have avoided the pitfalls of attempting full productions, instead keeping it local and small-scale.  While this approach caused problems for La bohème (Puccini) – the production relying a bit too much on the work’s popularity -  it suited the one-act double bill of The Wandering Scholar (Holst) and Riders to the Sea (Vaughan Williams) very well.

Puccini likes to make you take risks as a performer, as he knew it makes for a more exciting performance if everyone is just a little bit on edge… the sparring between Rodolfo and Marcello (on all levels – narrative, theatrical, musical…) is a good example, not to mention the seemingly random cascades of entries from different principals, choruses etc in the street scenes of Act II.  You need verve, imagination and unflappability to manage all that, qualities you couldn’t expect from Glasthule’s creative team, so the overall effect was more rehearsal than performance, with everything unevenly cut down to fit into a small space.  There is no pit in the Pavilion for starters, so the (small) orchestra had to be squeezed into stage left.  Corners were inevitably cut elsewhere as well.  If I’m being tough it’s only because the piece itself demands it.  For all its drawbacks, though, it was a more enjoyable Bohème than some I’ve seen, and there were some really good moments, which were well-applauded.

For the Holst and Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, this mismatch of scale was less of an issue, and they also benefited from stronger casts.  Seeing Doreen Curran’s Mauyra in particular was a rare privilege, and it’s made me want to write more about Riders, which I’ll do in a separate post.  It was preceded in good classical fashion by a satyr-play of sorts, with Holst’s wonderfully farcical Wandering Scholar, with John Molloy as the predatory priest (how topical is that?) after his slice of Sarah Power’s Alison.  The piece made me want to re-read Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, and I couldn’t help wondering how it went down with the headmistress at St Paul’s Girls’ School, where Holst held down his day job as a music teacher!