Director and writer Daisy Evens takes the helm for a new production of Madama Butterfly from Irish National Opera, which stars Celine Byrne and will have four performances in Dublin's Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this November - Daisy introduces the production below.
To me, Madama Butterfly is the most beautiful and perfect of operas. Within its sweeping music lives one of the most extraordinary heroines ever created — a young woman of fierce pride, honesty, and unshakable love. I have always admired Cio-Cio-San for her strength and dignity. She is no victim, but a mother driven by purpose, who falls beneath the wheels of fate yet achieves the impossible: she secures her son’s future, gifting him the life she can never have.
Though it is a story born of tragedy, it is also one of passionate, unconditional love — the love of a mother for her child in all its forms. That, to me, is what makes this opera timeless and profoundly human.
In imagining this production, I wanted to find a new way to bring that truth to light — to see Madama Butterfly through a different lens, one that feels cinematic, fluid, and emotionally immediate. The curtain rises not on Nagasaki, but on a quiet American funeral in 1990. Pinkerton is dead. His elderly wife, Kate, stands beside their grown son. She carries a lifetime of guilt, a secret that has shadowed their family for decades, a secret she has shielded her son from for all these years. At last, she must speak. She places in his hands a box of Japanese objects — delicate, authentic, beautiful — and through them, the extinguished story of his true mother unfolds.
Though it is a story born of tragedy, it is also one of passionate, unconditional love
As the son sifts through the fragments of his past, time dissolves. He pieces together scenes from a Japan he has never known, walking through memories he evokes with what he has. He meets his younger self, faces the truth of his origins, and discovers what it means to belong. It becomes a journey of identity and memory — of what is inherited, what is taken, and what love demands of us.
Kate, too, emerges in a new light. Often dismissed as cold or complicit, I see her instead as a woman cornered by circumstance — perhaps a trophy wife, perhaps unable to bear children, living in an age that measured worth by appearances and obedience. In her own way, she is as trapped as Butterfly herself.
Through this lens, Madama Butterfly becomes not only a tale of East and West, but of people — flawed, desperate, loyal, and brave. It is about the cost of love, the weight of silence, and the search for redemption.
My hope is that audiences will see this beloved opera anew: cinematic, tender, devastating — and filled with the raw, universal beauty of truth.
Madama Butterfly is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from Sunday 2nd – Saturday 8th November - find out more here
