Hoffmann’s crazy tales lift the spirits

This Irish National Opera production was as fascinatingly grotesque as it was fantastically entertaining

The Tales of Hoffmann

Irish National Opera

O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin, September 15

Reviewed by Dick O’Riordan

As an opera, The Tales of Hoffmann would seem to be genre-fluid. You can diagnose it in a variety of ways, probably because its composer Jacques Offenbach died during rehearsals in 1880 and everybody has been trying to put it back together properly ever since. What we got here seemed to be an assortment of those efforts.