Going Dutch in Dublin: David Evans sees the ghostly ship making a rare visit to Ireland

Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, became in 1925 the first state-subsidised institution of its kind in the English-speaking world, but opera in Ireland has been less fortunate. Since 1951 the Wexford Festival has offered small, less well-known works, and various companies have produced staple operatic fare, but until the formation of Irish National Opera in 2017 from the merger of the Opera Theatre Company and Wide Open Opera, Ireland had nothing that could really be called national.