a little meditation on the nature of justice and human wickedness". It is this universality which allows the period piece to be resurrected for a 21st-century audience "It's from a 2005 perspective. We're not trying to create some museum piece, but it's crucial that it is set in this period," says Pimlott. No mere curio for the connoisseurs, but pioneering Wexford at its most inspired: surely an opera for the regular repertoire.Festival to 6 November (00 353 53 22144). As The Mousetrap enters an unprecedented 53rd year in London's West End, a new production of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, starring Tara Fitzgerald and Graham Crowden, and directed by Steven Pimlott, aims to inject new blood into the work of Britain's best-known crime writer.
Set in 1938, Christie's thriller follows a group of 10 strangers at a hotel on an isolated island, who are whittled down one by one in a series of murders As always with Christie, one should expect the unexpected. The first surprise is that this is a detective story without a detective. For Pimlott, this omission makes the play all the more thrilling: "It's a sort of Huis Clos [the Jean-Paul Sartre play that contains the famous line, "Hell is other people"], they're all locked together with their demons, which they are forced to confront. It's very witty and sharp, very unsentimental, but because there's no Poirot, no Miss Marple, there's no comfort zone There's no feeling of security, of 'We'll be all right. The servants, Vincent Pavesi and Lorena Scarlata Rizzo, are played like scarlet-clad guardian deities, who nurse the vengeful wheel of fortune as they once nursed the infant hero.The French conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud draws rewarding playing from the Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra in Faur? scintillating score.
The attractive American tenor Gerard Powers brings a soothing presence and a particularly lovely, tender delivery to Ulysses. The Canadian-Armenian mezzo Nora Sourouzian makes an ideal, touching P?lope: she moves wonderfully, her phrasing is acutely sensitive, while the voice transforms to a musical fieriness apt for pained outbursts. Both Ren?auchois' Homer-focused libretto and Faur? lusciously warm music - sometimes derided - are astonishingly skilled at preserving emotional intensity, while permitting P?lope's tortured inner stress to be viewed from all angles.The staging by Renaud Doucet, the director, works exquisitely well: he choreographs his sky-blue-clad suitors and white-masked, caryatid-like handmaids so subtly that the opera assumes a kind of balletic beauty. P?lope receives a gorgeous treatment from designer Andr?arbe, whose set teasingly offsets an idyllic Ionian seascape embracing surreal shades of Magritte with a monochrome, sculptured inner room that weaves together domestic bliss and incipient ennui. The music unfolds in a gorgeous, slow, almost Parsifalian skein, rather like that which Ulysses' wife, P?lope, weaves and then unravels by night, spurning the unwelcome marital attentions of the suitors who sprawl round her island home of Ithaca.This is one of those unerring Wexford successes. Thoughtful Italian conductor Roberto Polastri proved a marked asset, as did his brass and cor anglais soloists.Wexford also celebrated after this weekend's announcement that Sir Anthony O'Reilly, its president, and Independent News and Media are to give €1m (£675,000) each towards the new theatre development.Few people are aware Faur?rote an opera, yet P?lope is a scrumptious score. All three have an exciting delivery, a personal presence (even if moves were uneven) and an emotional range that brought a real intensity and nuancing to mature Donizetti.
