Madam, - I must write in response to the recent reviews and letters concerning Opera Ireland's recent season at the Gaiety, particularly its presentation of La Traviata. I saw the opera on its opening night and was surprised and impressed by the high quality of the production.
Your reviewer Michael Dervan, describing the same evening, saw fit to damn it with faint praise. Opinions, of course, will vary - but I cannot see why Mr Dervan's overall view was negative when so much of La Traviata succeeded so well, and so very well indeed for a Dublin production.
Mr Dervan's opinions are important because they raise the issue of why anyone would bother going to the opera in Ireland when they could buy a world-class recording of the same music for less than the price of most Gaiety tickets.
The same question can be asked almost anywhere; unless one lives in, say, Milan, one will always find the live experience far from perfect. But perfection is not what we look for at the theatre. What Opera Ireland delivered on its opening night was a rounded and coherent production, in which the orchestral playing was as strong and seamless as I have heard in the Gaiety pit, and whose principal players sang with accuracy and real commitment. If the set design did not please everyone, it brought home the full weight of the louche and callous world in which the characters operated, an essential element of the drama if we are to accept why and how Violetta sacrifices her happiness.
I see no reason why anyone would want to denigrate this production when it was clearly the work of a united group of people punching above their collective weight. - Yours, etc,
DAVID HANDY, Trimleston Avenue, Booterstown, Co Dublin.