Search online for the Longborough Ring cycle, and one of the web sites you are likely to find is for a holiday firm in Germany advertising trips to watch the operas here, in England—an indication of how seriously this Cotswold venue is now regarded.
So what are such Wagnerite reverse pilgrims likely to make of these productions, in a modest venue with only 500 seats, and no space in the wings or overhead for flats or flies? On the basis of this opening episode, they are unlikely to regret their trip to Gloucestershire’s Bayreuth.
Longborough had already established its reputation with its 2013 Ring as the only British house to mount a fully-staged cycle on the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, and with the new tetralogy, directed by Amy Lane, having begun its year-by-year introduction with Das Rheingold in 2019, it can claim a rare distinction of mounting two complete Rings within a decade.
The current cycle reprises that Rheingold, the 2022 Siegfried and 2023 Götterdämmerung largely with the same casts, with a new production of Die Walküre postponed by the 2020–21 COVID crisis.
Our German visitors would probably have welcomed a largely Konzept-frei interpretation of opera’s most ambitious and most director-appropriated work of imagination. That is not to say that Lane is unafraid of twisting the dial to reflect current sensibilities, for example, in a beautifully-choreographed scene, as two of Alberich’s slaves dance joyfully on their liberation.
There is a meaningful twist too, that may point to things to come, as Freia (Eleanor Dennis), despite her obligatory protests to the contrary, seems happy to go along with her giant abductor Fasolt (Pauls Putnins), content to disoblige the gods for an adventure with her bit of rough. An emergence of female free will is suspected.
A largely unchanging set design is necessarily modest, and awkward contrivances are sensibly managed: no hulking frames for giants Fasolt and Fafner, but ordinary working men atop stepladders; a video projection for the dragon; and the substitution of a Kermit-like toy for Alberich’s transformation into a toad, which gained the only laugh of show.
Any shortcomings are gloriously redeemed by Charlie Morgan Jones’s inspired lighting. It serves not simply to create illusion—the Rhine, a brilliant transformation to Mime’s forge—but to add meaning, as when the gold immediately loses its lustre when first stolen by Alberich. And the overhead lights pick up the gods in sharply-defined cones, as if they are individually trapped inside them.
Having heard Rings in some of the great opera houses, I appreciate the particular clarity and definition offered by Longborough’s small auditorium and sunken orchestra pit. It is immediately apparent in the singing of the Rhinemaidens Mari Wyn Williams, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones and Katie Stevenson, somewhat oddly dressed as if for a sultan’s harem, and strikingly so from the first utterance of the outstanding Mark Stone as Alberich.
This Niebelung, ill-tempered, capriciously cruel, can rage like a beast, and issues his curse in a manner to freeze the blood, but Stone never does so at the cost of musicality. In contrast of character, the other standout performance comes from Mark Le Brocq as Loge, happy like a playful Mephisopheles to play either side, clearly having the fun that an absence of conscience allows.
Madeleine Shaw is a commanding Fricka, and with an admirable ability to bend a phrase or two to register anguish at her treatment by her faithless husband Wotan.
In that role, Paul Carey Jones looks like a stern, avuncular grandfather in a Victorian photograph, but, in what clearly conforms to the director’s vision, never bestrides the stage as behoves an imperturbable god of the gods. His cry on snatching the ring from Alberich is as much one of pain as of triumph, and one suspects he recognises a fellow spirit in his unscrupulous adversary. As the curtain falls, the gods line up as if for a Royal family photograph, while Wotan staggers under the weight of it all. 14 hours away still, but the Dämmerung is coming.