★★★☆☆
Wagner’s Ring cycle is like a newspaper horoscope. To the susceptible it can seem relevant to any present human dilemma.
Take, for example, the gods in Das Rheingold. Floundering and increasingly geriatric, they are fixated on trying to “take back control”, yet fatally embroiled in contracts with the outside world that they thought would be easy to break, but which inexorably drag them to their doom. Remind you of anything?
Well, Keith Warner’s Royal Opera staging pre-dates our present political turmoil by a decade, which is probably just as well. To him the gods have a touch of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House about them. They are a bewildered but still haughty Victorian family, bullied in their own marble drawing room by menacing