Small is beautiful

As if to draw attention to the great Italian tradition of opera, the Wexford Festival features Bellini, Verdi and Puccini in the daytime sessions. I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Falstaff, and Madama Butterfly are squashed into The Barn at White's Hotel, and reduced to 90 minutes each. A piano provides the only accompaniment.

These meagre versions are immensely popular and it is easy to see why. The singers, who do not have to compete with an orchestra, can be more relaxed; producers and designers, challenged by the limitations, can come up with ideas that are both ingenious and simple; the audience, being so close to the action, can the more readily feel part of it.

The use of a video screen, however, must be accounted a failure. In Bellini's version of the Romeo and Juliet story (I Capuleti), it tendentiously showed scenes of present day violence in war-torn countries; in Falstaff, thumbnail sketches, caricatures of the characters, that in no way helped the audience to follow the plot.

Vital information could have been given about the ramifications of plot and counter-plot, but was withheld. On the whole, Madama Butterfly was wise to dispense with the video screen altogether.

Production values were at their highest in the rough and tumble of Falstaff. The ruffians moved around in a complicated choreography, matched by the women in their domestic movements, and the easily manipulated furniture lent itself to varied transformations. The piano, played by the director, Rosetta Cucchi, is such an integral part of the whole that it seemed to take on the life of an extra character.

I Capuleti is given a US setting reminiscent of West Side Story. The rival families are turned into basketball teams, run, it seems, by gangsters, and behaving like animals behind the screen of wire netting that occupies the front of the stage.

The dinginess of the setting negates, instead of setting off, the centre of interest, the fate of the star-crossed lovers. Bellini's choice of a mezzo soprano to sing the role of Romeo seems wilfully wrong, and the modern setting makes it even more so.

Though the cast, only one of whom is from Italy, all sing with Italian exuberance as if song were more natural than speech and the music makes the plot more persuasive than the play, when it is all over, one remembers only the composer's melodic gift, not his dramatic intention.

Sir John Falstaff is often played as an ageing rouΘ, but Massimiliano Gagliardi, young and far from pot-bellied, makes no attempt to mimic age; nevertheless he is such a good-humoured trickster that one cannot help liking him more than his opponents.

Alone against the world he makes the final chorus, in which he and his tormentors are reconciled, not only the outcome of his final defeat but also a personal triumph.

To play Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly , Wexford Festival has found a Korean singer, Lee Hung Soo. This adds greatly to the verisimilitude in a way but it means that the other Japanese characters are less credible.

Pinkerton is a heartless cad and is sung that way, so that the most moving moments turn out to be those between Butterfly and Sharpless, sensitively and expressively sung by John Fletcher. These two singers, incidentally, have the clearest Italian of the cast: this is important when there are no subtitles.

It is surprising how much operas can survive being reduced in scale: even somebody meeting them for the first time will take away a vision that is hardly distorted.

However, with just piano as accompaniment, Puccini's lavish score loses more than the others.

There are further performances of Madama Butterfly (on Monday 29th and Thursday, November 1st at, 3.30pm; Sunday 4th at 11am); I Capuleti e i Montecchi: today, Sunday 28th, and Saturday 3rd at 3.30pm; Falstaff: Saturday 27th at 11am, Tuesday 30th and Friday 2nd at 3.30pm). Box office 053-22144.