Shortworks

Whites Hotel

Remember Vera Galupe-Borszkh? The “traumatic soprano”, alter ego of Ira Siff, only appeared once at the Wexford Festival as part of the ensemble La Gran Scena. But Roberto Recchia, a Wexford regular who directs two of this year’s piano-accompanied ShortWorks productions, seems set on keeping her spirit before the public.

The all-male La Gran Scena and Ms Galupe-Borszkh (aka Mr Siff) were, of course, taking the piss out of opera and were especially sharp when it came to the foibles of famous divas. Recchia, too, must surely have had his tongue pressed hard into his cheek when he opened Pergolesi's La serva padrona( The Maid as Mistress) with a comedy routine spoken by the opera's one silent character, the servant Vespone (Recchia himself).

What, you might ask, was the point? Well, the ShortWorks, which are being presented this year in Whites Hotel, have lost the surtitles they once had at the Dun Mhuire Theatre. And Recchia held the stage to explain the full detail of the opera’s plot, which he had conveniently relocated to, well, Whites Hotel.

Recchia is not a man to forego a gag, and this La serva padronawas bursting with them, up to and including cream-packed pies in the face, the second one self-administered. It took more than 15 minutes to get to the first aria, and then the tricks were applied directly to the music too, with intrusions from later pieces tacked on to Pergolesi, even to the point of turning Uberto (now, nominally, the hotel manager) briefly into a lounge crooner.

Uberto, played by Bradley Smoak, and pianist Greg Ritchie (yes, the accompaniment was on piano rather than harpsichord) managed the transitions and style-hopping skilfully. Ekaterina Bakanová’s Serpina was lively and spunky but at times a little wayward in intonation.

Recchia was also responsible for Puccini's La Bohème. He updated the action to wartime France, laced in contemporary documentary film, presented Musetta's dalliance with Alcindoro as a fling with a Nazi officer and had Mimi sporting a Star of David in the closing acts. It all seemed rather too laboured, in spite of eager, youthful singing from Rebecca Goulden as Mimi and Noah Stewart as Rodolfo.

The third ShortWorks production was an altogether more straightforward affair. Pennsylvania-born Richard Wargo based his opera Ballymore, first produced in 1999, on the two one-act plays that make up Brian Friel's Lovers.

ShortWorks presented the first act, Winners, telling of the fate of two young lovers in the 1960s, not yet married but expecting a child, who die in a drowning accident. Wargo, whose music is in a soft-cored, American neo-conservative style, preserves Friel's narrators and further frames the story with pre-recorded music on uilleann pipes. The musical strength, such as it is, is that the words come across clearly, save when Wargo intertwines too closely the slightly awkward dramatic mechanism of the narrators.

Michael Shell’s production (designed, as were all the ShortWorks shows, by Kate Guinness) kept things simple, and Kristy Swift’s Mag and Robert Anthony Gardiner’s Joe chatted and cavorted with suitably juvenile enthusiasm and sulking.