The Opera
Wagner's culminating work in the Ring cycle begins on a mountain top, where the Three Norns, weaving the rope of destiny, recount earlier events and foretell the destruction of Valhalla. The rope snaps.
      After their night together, hero Siegfried and Brünnhilde part with exchanged tokens love: Siegfried gives her the Ring, and Brünnhilde gives him her horse, Grane. An orchestral interlude depicts Siegfried's Rhine journey.
      Siegfried then falls foul of the treachery of Gunther, leader of the Gibichung race, his sister Gutrune and half-brother, Hagen (son of Alberich) - their magic potion leads to Siegfried's betrayal of Brünnhilde, while in a dream Hagen is exhorted by Alberich to seize the Ring back for the Nibelungs.
      Following an unhappy double marriage ceremony (Siegfried-Gutrune & Gunther-Brünnhilde), the latter swears with Hagen to avenge herself on Siegfried - a hunting accident will be faked. Siegfried and Brünnhilde are made aware of the truth - too late. Siegfried is stabbed by Hagen. Brünnhilde takes the Ring from Siegfried's finger, promises to return the ring to the Rhine maidens and rides into Siegfried's funeral pyre to be reunited with him in death. Hagen attempts to grasp the Ring for himself, but is drowned by the Rhinemaidens. Valhalla is engulfed in flames.

The Performance
The health warning for what follows is that your reviewer spent the majority of the five-and-a-half hours in a state of irritation at the relentless sequence of banalities perpetrated by this production. Whether to return after the first interval was a very tough decision.
      Updating to demonstrate timeless relevance is perfectly legitimate, and can be energizing and inspiring, especially with a work like Twilight of the Gods which deals with human archetypes like power, love, betrayal and ultimate oblivion. But a cheap-trick search for superficial contemporary parallels lets everyone down.
      In the Coliseum on Saturday, time and again what Wagner's epic words and music were palpably seeking to convey was betrayed by the triviality of what was seen on stage, such that it was hard to appreciate the considerable achievements of the orchestra and conductor, and of many of the singers. Not only was it annoying, it was boring. Evidence that this was not a purely individual reaction was the number of closed eyes and chins sunk onto chests during the first act: over half the row was asleep. Perhaps the 3pm post-lunch start had something to do with it. Maybe some were trying to ignore the staging. Either way, something was very wrong given ENO's promise of a "gripping finale" and "great dramatic intensity".
      The audience entered to three ladies of a certain age sitting in wingback armchairs in front of the curtain - the impression was of the day-room in a home for retired headmistresses. Rather than spinning the rope of fate, there was some knitting going on. They then escaped, via the box containing the off-stage quartet of harps and then through the audience, stumbling along the front row but then accelerating up the aisle in the direction of the bar. Oddly this route was not used again in the production.
      The curtain rose to show Siegfried and Brünnhilde gazing at one another over a red-check table-cloth, flowers in a jug on the table, in a wooden cube suggestive of a timber frame house (NB the production is sponsored by MFI). She was dressed like Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, plus an apron, he looked like the main guy from Oklahoma. A great climax in the music accompanied her handing him a black suede jacket. She was left to wave girlishly into the audience after his departure, and then a curtain fell again and she was replaced by our hero miming valiantly (riding, then punting and apparently skateboarding) in front of huge projected video images of hurtling Marlboro-country landscape, then of water towards contemporary Manhattan. The guy from Oklahoma became Midnight Cowboy as he gazed around at film of a neon kaleidoscope of sex-shops, bars and night clubs.
      In fact, for a few moments, Siegfried being plunged into the red-light district worked well with the musical climax of the Rhine Journey interlude, although how inconvenient of the text to require him to arrive with a horse (invisible) and wearing a sword (visible and risible). One other scene stood out as appropriately striking - Hagen's followers as faceless black-clad riot police dazzling the audience with their torches beneath 6 giant missiles pointing out into the theatre, and then stripping off to multicoloured party-clothes to form the rent-a-crowd guests at the doomed wedding.
      But the wedding itself lurched back to the trivial - Siegfried the hero equals Siegfried the 21st century celebrity: on he swaggered in white stetson and cowboy suit, the guests/fans fawning and clicking flash cameras. As with much of the production, it was crisply lit, colourful - yet obvious and banal. Scenes were often surprisingly static, and the most imaginative thing characters were given to do tended to be to put on sunglasses (e.g. the Rhinemaidens).
      The climax sought to combine Brünnhilde's self-sacrifice and the destruction of Valhalla, but there was yet another depressingly obvious contemporary reference: she strapped on a suicide bomber's waistcoat loaded with explosives, brandished a detonator, and disappeared into the crowd surrounding Siegfried's body. Some sort of explosive coup-de-theatre would have been nice, to match the cataclysms of the orchestral score, but no - the lights just turned red and the crowd writhed, drama-school mime class style, while (Osama bin) Hagen failed in his final attempt to seize the Ring. Shimmering gold-lame curtains rose to engulf the scene and then disappeared leaving the stage black and empty.
      One tried hard to concentrate throughout on the musical strengths of this performance. There was largely magnificent playing from the orchestra - ripe, rich brass and lower winds (plus some great off-stage brass playing) - and there was a sense of real momentum and unity from Paul Daniel's direction (although it seemed only to highlight the tawdry, incoherent nature of much of the staging). Richard Berkeley-Steele as Siegfried led a cast of broadly excellent vocal quality, the standouts being the Hagen of Gidon Saks and the Brünnhilde of Kathleen Broderick which were world-class. What a shame the production intruded into one's appreciation of these achievements and led one to emerge from the theatre feeling cheated rather than inspired.
Nick Armstrong