‘Women and War’: Representations in the Creative Arts

Recorded September 19th, 2023. *Please note that this discussion
contains topics of sexual violence and graphic descriptions of war.
Please listen at your own discretion. ‘Women and War’ is the theme
of the 2023 Wexford Festival Opera (24 Oct-5 Nov). Developed by
Wexford’s Artistic Director, Rosetta Cucchi, this year’s programme
uses the medium of opera to explore how war is experienced,
endured, and articulated by women. The three main stage operas at
Wexford will be: Zoraida di Granata (1822) by Gaetano Donizetti;
L’Aube Rouge (1911) by Camille Erlanger; and La Ciociara (Two
Women) (2015) by Marco Tutino, based on the novel by Alberto
Moravia. In anticipation of this innovative programme, the Trinity
Long Room Hub is hosting a special discussion to explore the
representation of ‘Women and War’ in literature, theatre, music,
and visual art. The Festival’s acclaimed Artistic Director Rosetta
Cucchi will join the celebrated Irish Times foreign correspondent
Lara Marlowe and the Trinity Long Room Hub Director, Eve Patten,
for a wide-ranging conversation on the themes and vision behind
this year’s Wexford Festival Opera. This unique collaboration
event, which will include both film and music excerpts from the
opera programme itself, is open to all and not to be missed.
Speakers: Rosetta Cucchi is the Artistic Director of the Wexford
Festival Opera and an experienced director in many of the world’s
greatest opera houses. She is also a pianist, and has a master’s
degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Bologna. From 2006
to 2018, she was the Artistic Director of Fondazione and Symphonic
Orchestra Arturo Toscanini, Parma. Her most recent and future
directing projects include Tutino’s La Ciociara, Wexford Festival,
Figaro and La Bohème, Boston Lyric Opera, Adriana Lecouvreur,
Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Rossini’s Otello, Rossini Festival
Pesaro, Eugene Onegin, Opera Omaha, USA, and L’Amico Fritz, Teatro
del Maggio Musical Fiorentino. Lara Marlowe became a foreign
correspondent for The Irish Times in 1996. Since her official
retirement in April 2023 she has continued to contribute regularly
to the Irish Times and radio stations in France, Ireland and the
UK. She has worked extensively in France, the Middle East and the
US, and reported on the war in Ukraine in 2022. Before the Irish
Times, she wrote for Time Magazine, the Financial Times and the
International Herald Tribune, covering many major world events and
conflicts. Lara has received four press awards for her work for The
Irish Times and was also awarded a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur
for her contribution to Franco-Irish relations. In 2020, she
published the best-selling memoir Love in a Time of War, My Years
with Robert Fisk. Eve Patten is Director of the Trinity Long Room
Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English
at Trinity College, Dublin. She lectures and writes in the area of
nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Irish literary history
and has a special interest in the literature of war. Her most
recent book is Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist
Imagination (2022), and previous publications include Imperial
Refugee: Olivia Manning's Fictions of War (2012), and, as co-editor
with Richard Pine, Literatures of War (2008). Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/