music · Oct 27, 2026 · DAILY TRANSMISSION
A Man Climbs a Flagpole. Wexford Turns It Into Opera.
For its 75th season, Wexford Festival Opera puts a baffling town mystery inside a grain store—and lets local people sing the fallout.
Forty days up, nobody knows why
Picture it: a man climbs a flagpole in a small town. Then he stays there for 40 days. He gives nobody an explanation, which is either magnificent or deeply annoying, depending on your personality.
That strange image powers Still, life…, a new opera at Wexford Festival Opera. Composer and librettist Ailís Ní Ríain made the work from a William Goyen short story. Its real subject is the crowd below: the people trying to watch, guess, worry, gossip, and force a neat meaning onto something that refuses one.
The opera is a world premiere, and it is not tucked into a polite theater box. It plays in the Grainstore at Stonebridge through October 30. That setting suits a story about a town whose usual routines get interrupted by one impossible-looking human problem.
The grain store gets weird
Still, life… is called an installation-opera. An installation is an artwork built for a particular space, often using the room itself as part of the experience. Here, opera joins music with text, video, and imagery in a work shaped around the Grainstore site.
That makes the place more than a rental venue. A former grain store can hold the story’s unsettled feeling: public, physical, and a little off-kilter. The piece is site-responsive, meaning it was designed in response to that specific location.
Wexford’s wider festival has plenty of grand opera machinery running at the same time. Its 75th edition runs from October 15 to 31, with 75 events over 17 days. Mascagni, Rossini, and Prokofiev are on the bill, alongside talks, tours, recitals, and smaller works across town.
The town isn’t just watching
The best twist is hiding in plain sight. Still, life… is about a community reacting to one man’s baffling behavior. It is also performed by a community that includes 17 named Wexford cast members alongside six professional performers and narrator Brian Mullen.
That does not turn the project into a cute side activity. Ní Ríain wrote an original commissioned opera, and professional singers including Eilís Dexter, Cuan Durkin, Éadaoin Hassett, Eiméar Harper, and Yasmin O’Reilly perform within it. The local cast is part of the work’s actual engine.
Community opera has been a Wexford Festival Opera strand since 2023. For 2025’s A Little Midsummer’s Night Dream, 43 local residents joined workshops and 19 performed. The festival began in 1951 with opera fan Dr. Tom Walsh, local friends, and volunteers, so this town-sized casting has some family resemblance to its roots.
A mystery needs a crowd
Opera often gives us kings, doomed lovers, and people making terrible decisions near a river. Still, life… takes a different route: a silent guy on a pole, and everybody else losing their minds around him. That is funny, but it also has teeth.
When someone refuses to explain themselves, the rest of us get busy. We make theories. We assign motives. We turn a mystery into a local event, because empty space makes people itchy.
Wexford’s October 23 and 25 performances sold out. Remaining performances are scheduled for October 28 and October 30, both at 4:30 p.m. On October 28, the festival also has Stanford’s Much Ado About Nothing, a lunchtime recital, and Mascagni’s Iris—because apparently one ordinary day can hold several universes of singing.
Let the weird thing stay weird
A 75th anniversary could have been only a victory lap. Wexford has earned one, sure. Instead, one of its boldest current gestures puts a new work in a grain store and gives the town a role in telling its own story.
There is something cheering about that arrangement. The festival remains international, but its people are not merely the audience arriving after the important art has been made. They are in the piece, carrying its questions through the room.
Somewhere in Wexford, a man stays on a flagpole. Down below, the town sings back.
SOURCES FROM THIS TRANSMISSION
Wexford Festival Opera 15–31 October 2026 ↗Wexford Festival Opera: 'Still, life...' New Opera by Ailís Ní Ríain | Contemporary Music Centre ↗75 events over 17 days at landmark Wexford Festival Opera ↗Wexford Festival Opera | All Events | National Opera House ↗