There have been many attempts to cut Wagner’s operas down to size, often by turning his characters into comic-book heroes and villains.
Composer Jonathan Dove had something else in mind when he prepared his reduced version of the Ring Cycle, which plays over two evenings instead of four and requires only 12 singers and an orchestra of 18 players.
Dove respected the Wagnerian essence while making the cycle more suitable for small companies: ambitions that match the ethos of Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre’s low-budget, high-intensity opera festival. Grimeborn can’t run to all four operas, so makes do with the first and shortest, Das Rheingold.
Julia Burbach’s production makes the opera a tragi-comedy of bourgeois greed, summed up by the line “Is nothing sacred when men crave power?” (The opera is sung in the original German).
The set is cardboard boxes, the gold of the title polystyrene, Wotan’s spear a walking stick. Even in this form, the opera remains a big sing, and Paul Carey Jones’s Wotan, cleanly sung and boldly acted, holds everything together. The slender forces of Orpheus Sinfonia, conducted by Peter Selwyn, occasionally sound like a silent cinema pit band, but the big moments still make the floor shake.
Until August 10 (arcolatheatre.com)
