Thinking big in Wexford

Michael Hunt takes over as CEO of Wexford Festival Opera as the Theatre Royal is flattened for a huge rebuilding programme. He talks to Michael Dervan.

As Michael Hunt tells it, opera in his life was a matter of love at first sight. And first sight, which came at the age of 14, was a good seat in the stalls at London's Coliseum, for an English National Opera production of opera's most famous double bill, Cav & Pag. He got there by the most unusual route. As a youngster he suffered from a bad stammer, and says his father "made me sing and perform in a Gilbert & Sullivan opera to train me to speak, because I actually couldn't communicate at all".

The remedy worked for the stammer ("from then on I was able to speak, and I became an over-communicator"), and the reward for everyone in the Gilbert & Sullivan production just happened to be that night out at ENO, with a backstage tour thrown in for good measure.

"I had never been in such a big room before. And we saw this extraordinary story. I absolutely loved the bigness of it, the enormousness of it, the sound from the orchestra. And they're two pieces I'm still very fond of, probably rather unpopularly so. Actually, I'm rather fonder of Cav than Pag, and I think the received wisdom is that Pagliacci is the better piece."

Having been smitten, Hunt says he spent "quite a long time wondering what to do with myself, before I found myself sitting in the stalls of the Coliseum, directing an opera, which was a nice little circle."

He had directed the sixth-form play at school when he was only in fourth year himself, but the pressure from his family was to study medicine. He compromised by choosing chemistry at the University of Liverpool before, as he puts it, "I kind of ran away with the circus just before my finals". In Liverpool, he soaked up all the theatre he could, and found himself one evening sounding off over post-performance drinks to someone who turned out to be the Everyman Theatre's Peter James. The response was an invitation to direct Harold Brighouse's Zack.

Hunt's conversation is peppered with references to things he has done "because I didn't know that I couldn't". Directing Zack is one of them. Running an arts centre in Cheltenham is another - "nineteen and a half thousand square feet of building, one electric light bulb and a Calor Gas heater, and in a year and a half we made that into a studio theatre and a recording studio, two artists' galleries and a bar and a cafe, because I didn't know that I couldn't. Someone once described me as being 'tenacious in the face of adversity'.

"In those days, you tried things. You were good or you weren't good. You were apprenticed. Even when I went from Liverpool to running my own theatre and arts centre, and then to being a staff director at the Coliseum, I kind of decided to go and learn how to do something after I had been doing it. It wasn't an academic way of learning. I would sit in a room with David Pountney while he was doing what he did, and absorb some of that."

THE ASSOCIATION with Wexford goes back a long way, to 1982, when he was the first producer of the piano-accompanied Operatic Scenes, which the then artistic director, Elaine Padmore, introduced. A deeper engagement with Ireland arose from an invitation in the mid-1990s from venues around the country to put together an opera tour that would present more popular repertoire than Opera Theatre Company was then focusing on. The outcome, Co-Opera, which he started without direct subvention from the Arts Council, was another instance of doing something because he didn't know he couldn't.

Co-Opera also indirectly provided the long-term reason for staying in Ireland. "On that first tour I met Carmel, and I thought, that's a woman I'd like to spend the rest of my life with, or something like that." They're now married, and in a four-week period earlier this year had their first child and moved house twice.

The rocky road of Co-Opera's survival involved integration into Opera Ireland and then separation from it when that company's troubles were peaking, a relocation to the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick (where Hunt became associate director), and most recently an association with Waterford's Theatre Royal where Hunt was director before taking up his post as chief executive of Wexford Festival Opera.

The attractions of Wexford were immediate and obvious. "I don't want to sound ungrateful, but a lot of the work I've done in Ireland has been a struggle, a hard struggle. This was an opportunity to work for a company who had a sense of themselves, knew what they were doing, had a real focus and a real energy and imagination about what they are heading toward.

"And what they are heading toward is something quite astonishing. The plans for the new building are plans for the best theatre that's ever been built in Ireland. I say that without any doubts or hesitations at all. And I'm not just saying that because I have the job of delivering it. It is an astonishing achievement that a company in that small town on the south-east of Ireland has created this internationally renowned festival. Everywhere I've ever been internationally in opera - I've directed in North America, in Spain, wherever - you mention Ireland and they mention Wexford, the Wexford Festival."

Wexford, says Hunt, is "an opportunity for me to work with very, very skilled professionals, and not be the brightest person in the room. It is a wonderful opportunity to learn and to change. You always want to challenge yourself against things that have real importance, and real sticking power. And Wexford is one of them.

"In my opinion, Wexford is really the only opera game in town. It's a very stable organisation which has a very good sense of its creative work, of its strategies for the future, of its momentum. Every single day that I'm in there, we're challenging ourselves to deliver something really extraordinary, down to the fact that I arrive and within 12 months of my arrival we're going to do two festivals. That's quite astonishing, to gear up in that sort of way."

The gearing up involves a refit (a "complete transformation") of the parish hall, Dún Mhuire, to accommodate this year's productions, the erection of a 650-seat "temporary theatre" (definitely not a tent, he says) at Johnstown Castle for a festival next May and June (with different programming and a slightly different target audience), and, in October 2008, the opening of the first festival in the 750-seat theatre.

THE REWARD at the end of the next two years, he says, will be a theatre "which we don't just intend to use for the Wexford Festival. We intend to extend Wexford Festival, and the reach of the festival during the year. But we intend also to use this theatre in an appropriate way to repay the considerable public investment that it has cost. "We're looking at developing a spring season. We're looking at developing the artists' development programme. So we're going to have a lot more opportunities for people to come."

The festival normally sells out months in advance, but the change from October to May next year is expected to cause a change in the booking pattern, enabling many people who've not had the opportunity to attend before to have their first sampling of the Wexford experience.

The scaling up (the Johnstown theatre will have a bigger capacity than the old Theatre Royal), and the bringing forward of the 2007 festival will stretch the organisation.

"By the time we get to 2008," says Hunt, "we will have built the capacity as an organisation that we need to deliver the new theatre."

What's under development at the moment, he says, is what will be "the best performing arts facility in Ireland. It will have an opera festival. We're hoping to have the spring season. We're commissioning a new opera from Brian Irvine. We're going to develop two resident performing arts companies. We're going to have a resident theatre company. This is going to be an existing theatre company who are going to move to Wexford. We're now in the process of looking for a dance company."

He's also in discussion with opera companies which tour internationally, and, he says, the Wagner name even came up in some recent discussions. But, make no mistake. "The traditional festival will remain what it is. It's a niche festival, examining the very rare in terms of what's exposed in this country and in Europe. It will remain that way. It ain't broke and we're not going to try and fix it."

The Wexford Festival runs from today until Sun, Nov 5 (053-9122144)