William Tell: Irish National Opera gives Rossini’s epic the just-right treatment

William Tell

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

★★★★☆

The big question ahead of Irish National Opera’s (INO) William Tell is not about the cast or designs or staging or conducting. It’s way more basic: after the curtain goes up, at 7pm, what will an almost four-hour running time look like by 11pm?

The answer, in an overall win for INO, is that it feels just as just-right as Goldilocks’ porridge. While naturally the greatest credit goes to Rossini for his musical and narrative instincts, it’s pretty easy to imagine those four hours feeling like four months in the wrong hands.

In Ireland’s first performance of William Tell since 1877, INO’s assembled cast and artistic team generate that Goldilocks outcome by animating the very particular vision of Julien Chavaz, the production’s director. He accentuates rather than masks the story’s mythical nature. His overarching look is unreal, almost comic book, with obvious colour-coded heroes and villains, the Swiss good guys dressed in cream and beige by the costume designer Severine Besson, their cruel Habsburg oppressors in blood-red. He signals oneness between the Swiss people and nature by adding animal features to some of the chorus. This might sound a bit pantomime, yet it never slides into that. Chavaz’s sets, designed by Jamie Vartan, are highly effective but minimalist, almost propless, so that your focus goes consistently to the kaleidoscope of human activity on stage.

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It’s a kaleidoscope because, between cast and large chorus, lots of people are on it most of the time, and Chavaz, deploying one of his most important Goldilocks strategies, makes all of them very watchable. Their movement and dancing come in a delightful and natural-looking blend of uniformity and freedom, powerfully communicative, under the direction of the choreographer Nicole Morel, whose troupe of four captivating dancers appear periodically to punctuate the story.

It’s not all perfect. The tenor Jesús León never really inhabits the opera’s most conflicted character, Tell’s fellow conspirator Arnold, who is in love with the Habsburg princess, and ends up emoting self-pityingly rather than participating convincingly in the action or matching chemistry with the soprano Máire Flavin. And there are occasional misjudgements, including the famous placing of the apple on the head of Tell’s son.

Yet this is also one of the musical highpoints of the night, as the baritone Brett Polegato instructs his son to remain still. Others include Flavin serenading the forest in Sombre Forêt and the rousing call to arms that ends act two, all zestily accompanied by the INO orchestra under conductor Fergus Sheil.

William Tell continues at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin 2, on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, November 9th, 11th and 12th, all at 7pm, and on Sunday, November 13, at 4pm