Music Richard Osborne

‘Who I am?’ Tanya asks the hotel’s manageress as she poses by a Vespa in a pink outfit, puffing on a cigarette.

‘Peppa Pig?’ suggests the manageress.

And on a family tour of the Godfather sites, Albie explains to his father and grandfather that the reason men still love the Francis Ford Coppola movies is ‘because they feel emasculated by modern society’.

The White Lotus is conceived, written and directed by Mike White, a slowburning genius whose obsessions include the ghastliness of rich white Americans, the ghastliness of most straight men, the ghastliness of all families and every marriage, and the ghastliness of those oldies who fail to understand the salvation offered by their ghastly sanctimonious children.

Still visually luxurious and with probably the best credit sequence in TV history, season two is less funny, less dark and, like the new Lady Chatterley’s Lover, less shocking than the original.

Frances Wilson is author of Burning Man: The Trials of DH Lawrence

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE WEXFORD FESTIVAL

‘Groggy with joy after three days of unparalleled delight that is to be had in the bottom right-hand corner of Ireland every year in late autumn.’

That’s how the late Bernard Levin reported on his first visit to the Wexford Festival in 1967.

Nowadays, there’s both a festival and a fringe – some 80 events during this year’s 17-day festival. The centre still holds: three rarely-heard operas played in three separate cycles.

Some visitors do two cycles: the first to experience the opera, the second to relish it at leisure. ‘You’d be a damned fool to do otherwise!’ barked an elderly San Franciscan, a Wexford regular these past 30 years.

You get the odd dud, of course. No one, I sensed, was rushing to revisit La Tempesta, Fromental Halévy’s grand-opera rewrite of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first seen (in Italian) in London in 1850.

As to its two companions, my San Franciscan friend was right. You’d be a damned fool not to want to see again Dvořák’s shamefully neglected operatic swan song Armida, or Félicien David’s exotic 1862 musical comedy LallaRoukh, loosely based on Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh.

Wexford folk are famously friendly. ‘It’s a comely little town, is it not?’ a local called out as I contemplated the magnificent sky-blue outer wall of the Thomas Moore Tavern with its four airborne Guinness toucans.

Though Moore’s mother came from Wexford, Moore himself was a Dubliner, who decamped to London at the age of 20. It was there that he won fame – and no small fortune – with the first of his folk-song volumes, Irish Melodies, published in 1808.

Lalla Rookh (1817) was an even bigger hit for Moore, an oriental fantasy after the manner of The Arabian Nights that his new best friend Lord Byron had suggested he write.

Pretty well unreadable today, it was extensively mined by some of the 19th century’s leading composers, Berlioz and Schumann among them.

David’s is a lovingly crafted score, contemporary with the work of Offenbach and the young Bizet. It smiles back to Rossini, whose vocal and

Some Irish eyes are smiling: Mirza (Niamh O’Sullivan, left) and Lalla- Roukh (Gabreille Philiponet) in Lalla-Roukh at the 2022 Wexford Festival