Sir, - Why do your theatre critics rarely take producers to task? The latest production of Madame Butterfly in the Gaiety was a travesty. Here we have one of the most impassioned love duets in all music and we find the tenor on his knees playing with trinkets as he passionately sings "vieni, vieni"; and in the lines such as, "I hold you as you flutter", the lovers are not even within arms length of each other - in fact there is no embrace at all as they sing with their backs to each other across the stage. Even the "Cherry Duet" had no sense of the happy preparations for Pinkerton's return. The costumes are so dull; there is nothing distinctive on any of them to denote who they are.
I ask myself if these people study the lines of the libretto. You can be modern, yes, but you can't ignore either what the music tells you or what the words want to convey. Why insult the composers, and in the case of this Butterfly, the glorious voices of the singers? They, and the public, deserve better. - Yours, etc.,
A.J. Beckett, Green Road, Blackrock, Co Dublin.