La Tempesta at Wexford Festival Opera: Shakespeare’s enchanted island gets a youthful and slick spin

O’Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford, until November 3

Giorgi Manoshvili as Calibano in La Tempesta. Photo by Clive Barda

Katy Hayes

Wexford Festival Opera continues its tradition of producing the more neglected full-length operas, and this version of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest by French composer Fromental Halévy meets this criteria neatly. It premiered in London in 1850 to acclaim but is never revived. It is sung in Italian with English surtitles.

Writer Eugène Scribe, a popular French playwright of the period, is a librettist taking liberties. Shakespeare’s play is entirely reshaped: the enchanted island and the storm remain but the emphasis shifts from Prospero to the young people. What is backstory in the play — Caliban’s threat to rape Miranda and “people this isle with Calibans” — becomes the focus.