Rosetta Cucchi, Francesco Cilluffo, and a well-picked cast make the strongest possible case for an unsettling but still rewarding work.
Reviewed by Tom Hardwick Photos by Padraig Grant
Wexford Opera Festival began their seventy-fifth anniversary season with a convincing production of Pietro Mascagni’s 1898 Iris. Set in Japan, it springs from the same vein of late nineteenth century japonisme that produced both The Mikado and Madama Butterfly (and Luigi Illica wrote both Puccini’s and Mascagni’s libretti), but its plot makes it a much harder pill to swallow. The young Iris’s sunlit, bucolic life playing with her dolls and caring for her blind father is invaded by the rake Osaka and the procurer Kyoto (Illica may never have visited Japan, but he had certainly seen it on the map). Osaka is desperate to possess Iris, so Kyoto distracts her with a puppet show in which Osaka appears as the son of the Sun God and abducts her. They take her to Kyoto’s geisha house where Osaka, no longer divine, fails to seduce her. Iris begs to go home but he discards her. Kyoto puts Iris on show to passers-by in the red-light district: her father, who has traced her there, finds her and curses her. She throws herself into the sewers, where ragpickers strip her dying body. A sea of flowers raises her to the sun, where at last she finds peace.
Iris is an unrelenting, unsparing story of a young woman’s exploitation by men which offers little uplift, and it is not difficult to see why it isn’t frequently performed. Rosetta Cucchi, Wexford’s artistic director, first came to Wexford in 1995 to work on the festival’s first production of Iris, and chose to direct her own version this year. Devoid of Orientalist distraction, the production sees the world through Iris’s eyes, made visible through Thomas Achitz’s striking video projections and Tiziano Santi’s spare but telling sets: kudos to both for creating a last act rubbish heap that managed to be both repellent and elegant.
Leyla Gu, as Iris, kept her voice in check as the unspoiled girl of the first act, before unleashing her reserves in the second and third acts. Her second act ‘octopus aria’, describing a temple screen decorated with a scene of a young woman being smothered by an octopus (curious readers search for images of the original at their own risk), grew to an engrossing, queasy climax. Long-standing Wexford collaborator Joseph Calleja sang Osaka with conviction: ‘apri la tua finestra’, an extremely popular stand-alone aria during Mascagni’s lifetime, was almost irresistible. Younger baritone Jolyon Loy was a sinister leather jacketed Kyoto who moved from smooth to snarling. Wexford always takes care with smaller roles, and tenor Yu Shao shone as the beggar and ragpicker.
The opera begins and ends with the powerful, radiant Hymn to the Sun, probably the opera’s best-known piece, where the Wexford Chorus were well drilled by Andrew Synnott and sparely, effectively choreographed. Iris is conductor Francesco Cilluffo’s third Mascagni for Wexford, and he gave a lyrical account of the score. There is hard-won redemption of a sort in Iris’s final transfiguration from the gutter to the sky (taken literally, as Leyla Gu was hoisted up as the curtain fell). It’s a tribute to the director and cast that the journey never felt impossible, nor the destination a let-down.
Iris runs as part of Wexford Festival Opera on 15, 20, 23, 28 and 31 October 2026
Published post no.3,051 – Sunday 18 October 2026
