Irish opera lovers are naturally pleased that Opera Ireland will resume full-scale productions next months, after a two-year lay-off - enforced by money problems - during which they presented only non-acted, concert versions.
But this opera fan at least has a small qualm, summed up in the following question: Do opera directors have a plaque on the wall saying: "Keep reminding them how clever you are"? Here's an example of what I mean.
Mozart's Figaro comes on stage singing and carrying a ladder. He climbs the ladder, sits precariously on top of it, turns his back to the audience and starts measuring. The wall? The ceiling? No, he is measuring the floor. From the top of a ladder.
Later, a gardener runs madly round the Count's expensively furnished room, pushing a dirty wheelbarrow. No relation to the plot of course. It's merely the director, as in many modern opera productions, trying to take our minds off the music.
That Figaro production took place in Munich last July, but director disease has also struck in Dublin in recent years.
A production of Janácek's Katya Kabanova in 2000 also had a ladder centre stage when Katya and Boris met in the garden, where, according to the plot summary in the programme, they "embrace passionately and swear eternal fidelity". That was obviously a bit dull for the director, so we got not just the passionate embrace, but the full, simulated sex bit. Where? Halfway up a tall, swaying ladder, with the copulating lovers trying to sing, hang on to the ladder and keep an eye on the conductor all at the same time.
Verdi's fat knight was also given a ladder in a 1998 production of Falstaff. Why? So he could get into his armchair. But you don't need a ladder to get into an armchair. Not usually, but this armchair was on top of a wardrobe. Don't bother asking why.
And why did one character in a production of Carmen have to run round and round the stage for no obvious reason, wearing only boots and underpants? The director of a 2001 production of Verdi's Don Carlo had another bright idea. Leaves. Hundreds of large, dry leaves, falling on the stage as a symbol of autumn, decay, sadness - anything you like. At one stage the lovers sang a tender duet while men, supposedly spying discreetly on them from behind trees, crunched around on the leaves like horses chewing apples. When the lovers moved, they too crunched in harmony. It was like that scene in Singing in the Rain where the clueless leading lady in the new-style talkie keeps moving and making scratching noises on the microphone attached to her bosom.
Then Don Carlo has to discover a picture of his wife's lover in her jewellery casket. Where would you expect the queen to keep the casket? On the dressing table? In a safe? Forget it. Hiring dry leaves every night is an expensive business, so you have to get the most out of them. Result? Elisabetta hid her casket outside, under the leaves, just where Don Carlo would walk along and trip over it, while the orchestra in the pit busily flicked fallen leaves off their fiddles and cellos.
Leaves and ladders are fairly easy to manipulate. Too easy for that 2001 production of Carmen, where the locals did not, for once, dance merrily on to the stage. They came by car. Five cars in fact. But of course you can't drive cars on to a stage, so they had to be pushed and pulled on to it. It looked as if all the cars had broken down, or perhaps the locals were too poor to afford cars with engines. And during the singing all you could think about was how they got the cars into the theatre, where they came from, and why anyone bothered in
the first place.
Perhaps the director had been inspired by an earlier production of Pagliacci, when the broken-hearted lover sang the main aria, "Vesti la Giubba", sitting in a Fiat Bambino, using the rear-view mirror to check his make-up. The heavyweight tenor could just about squeeze into the front seat, and it looked as if his beloved had given him the heave-ho either because he was overweight or because he could only afford a Bambino.
One can easily forgive an unfortunate slip, as happened in a production of Tosca in the National Concert Hall, when the stage gun didn't work and Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi, showing great presence of mind, waited a few seconds and then rolled over dead as if he had just had a heart attack.
The distraught Tosca then has to jump off a castle to kill herself. But the production could not come up with something for her to jump off, so she just ran off stage, leaving open the intriguing possibility of Tosca, The Sequel, with Cavaradossi perhaps recovering from that coronary to belt out a few high Cs.
So even though we got only concert performances of one opera, Bellini's Norma, from Opera Ireland in Dublin in 2003, there was the consolation that, for the second year running, the singers and the music were in all senses centre stage, without a ladder or a leaf in sight.
But opera lovers are a forgiving bunch, so if next month's productions can even approach the standard of some fine recent presentations such as Handel's Giulio Cesare or Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, there will be few complaints.