Opera has fascism in its sights, but battle plan is too timid

Opera has fascism in its sights, but battle plan is too timid

Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, originally in Italian, dates from 1853. Wexford Festival Opera here offer us the slightly later reworked French version, complete with a ballet inserted. To make this kind of mid 19th-century work effective in a contemporary production, interpretations often add some element of dramatic irony, subversion or new political contexts. Here, director Ben Barnes maps the original on to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.