Wexford Festival Opera 2026: Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing. Image, uncredited.
**
The second of two pocket operas celebrating Irish composers at Wexford Festival Opera 2026, Charles Villiers Stanford’s 1901 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is much loved but little revived. Libretto by Julian Sturgis again confirming why no one would want to be a virtuous woman in an opera. Unsubstantiated accusations enough to declare the lovesick Hero (soprano Victoria Harley) guilty till proven innocent. Compelling her true love Claudio (tenor Joshua Baxter) to abandon her at the altar. Society’s only concern to prove he was wrongly deceived. His fickle devotions returning once Hero has been vindicated. At which point both Hero and Claudio, along with their friends, Benedick (baritone Ross Cumming) and Beatrice (soprano Charlotte Baker), can live happily ever after. Proving that when stripped back to plot without its elegant language, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing presents little else but hurdles. Hurdles director Aoife Spillane-Hinks valiantly tries to surmount. Even so, Much Ado About Nothing falls at all the important fences.
Looking like an English garden party, were it not for the use of cell phones you might think 1920s with its Bright Young Things. But lack of clarity is the least of this ragged production’s problems. Unfocused, nervous performances suggest a director having lost the reins or never having had them in the first place. Lacking confidence and cohesion, performers appear amateurishly unsure of themselves and each other. Seemingly left to their own devices, they over-egg the performative omelette, especially Cumming’s tense and shambolic Benedick. Cast members endlessly chewing through Lisa Krügel’s garden green scenery. Krügel’s lush set and costumes suggesting the judicious removal of an unneeded plant next to the deck chair, along with the shortening of the wedding dresses by a couple of trip-inducing inches, would not only make life easier for the cast it would keep the health and safety officer happy.
Singing is also an issue, most evident in early choral sequences where voices compete rather than collaborate in an effort to be heard. The sound jarring and unpleasant even as the issue eases a little as the production progresses. Yet even then vocal chemistry between Harley’s Hero and Baxter’s Claudio is completely at odds. Yet there are silver linings, notably bass-baritone Wonsick Oh, whose tone, power and texture suggests great things to come. And a moment of stunning beauty in a stage-image built around glare from a cell phone showing just what Spillane-Hinks is capable of.
Like the disappointing phallic daggers proclaiming themselves to be swords, Much Ado About Nothing boasts of being far bigger than it actually is. The feeling of a production plated up before it was properly prepared dominates. Of needing more time in the rehearsal oven for confidence and cohesion to grow. Hopefully it will get that chance. As it stands, Much Ado About Nothing essentially lives up to its name.
Much Ado About Nothing by Charles Villiers Stanford, with libretto by Julian Sturgis after Shakespeare, runs at the Jerome Hynes Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford, as part of Wexford Festival Opera 2026 on 17, 21, 23, 25, 28 and 30 October.
For more information visit Wexford Festival Opera
