TULLY POTTER reviews Rheingold at the Royal Opera House

Here we go again… just five years after Keith Warner’s tasteless Rheingold was last published, the prologue to Wagner’s Ring cycle has fallen into the hands of Australian camp master, Barrie Kosky.

Covent Garden seems unable to rise to the challenge posed by the stature of Wagner’s music and its mythic imagination – and if your stage vision can’t match, what’s the point?

Time and again Kosky offers us theatrical ‘business’ instead of grandeur.

Yes, there is humor in Rheingold, but when everything is reduced to the level of an evening with Dame Edna, the real humor is lost. Loge, the god of fire, annoying at the best of times, is giggling furiously.

Wagner’s grand finale resembles Strictly Come Dancing, with glitter raining down. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to have the gods in polo clothes, with polo sticks flourishing at crucial moments.

Looks like the wig department is on vacation. It’s all very well having a bald Alberich, head of the Nibelungs, but when Wotan, king of the gods, is a dead ringer for Iain Duncan Smith, one loses faith in his divine powers.

Throughout the evening we are blessed with a Symbolically Emaciated Naked Old Lady, sometimes spinning around on a kind of lazy Susan and other times as the ghost at the banquet oversees the action. She turns out to represent Erda, the goddess of earthly wisdom.

The Rufus Didwiszus set is a variation on that old cliché, the massive tree trunk. Wotan’s spear is a weedy branch. And after seeing molten gold being poured, I’m not impressed with the liquid on display here: a cross between vomit and school custard.

I enjoyed the Nibelungs, kids with huge papier-mâché heads, but most of the costumes are inappropriate, like Alberich’s suit and tie.

Of the two giants, Fasolt credibly looks like a builder, but Fafner looks like a football manager, and they’re not gigantic – they might at least have a lift stuck in their shoes.

The singing is good. Christopher Purves is an evil Alberich and IDS, er, I mean, Christopher Maltman produces unexpected power as Wotan.

Marina Prudenskaya is a fine Fricka, Sean Panikkar an excellent Loge when he’s not giggling and Brenton Ryan a promising mime. Wiebke Lehmkuhl, the voice of Erda, has improved since 2018.

Antonio Pappano has also become a better Wagner conductor over the past five years. I’m still not convinced by the sounds of the Nibelheim anvils, but the orchestra plays well – a special bouquet for the wind section.