This Sounds Encouraging

This, on the upcoming new Adelaide (Australia) Ring:

For four years Elke Neidhardt has thought of little else but Wagner's Ring cycle, an epic, four-episode saga of the fall of man peppered with greed, lust, fire, brimstone, fairytales, love and vengeance. Apart from a 10-day stretch at Palm Beach, when she shut the door on the world, German-born Neidhardt has been magnificently obsessed with creating Australia's first, fully-realised - an important qualification after Opera Australia managed two of the four operas in the 1980s - of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

[...]

Assembling a core team of set, costume and lighting designers at a house in the Blue Mountains, she began to put a frame around this unique production. She knew what she did not want. "I didn't want a conventional Ring," she says. Nor did she want the self-consciously avant garde productions that divorce action from meaning, as was the case with a recent production of Parsifal at Bayreuth in Germany that closed with the projected image above the stage of two dead rabbits whose bodies were slowly consumed by maggots as they decomposed. "We didn't want a German-style, deconstructed sort of concept where very often you don't recognise what is on stage," she says, clearly irritated. "It's off the wall, it's terribly successful, I don't know why, I hate this stuff, it's just one big old wank."

Clarity was her starting point. Without tying the production to a particular era or style, she has tried to tell the story as simply and purely as she can, interpreted where necessary but primarily true to Wagner's words and music. "The story I hope now will be totally clear," she says. "It is in a modern setting but not limited by time so it's not set in any period. The gods look like gods, and you will know they are gods because they are all white, on a white floor. They are absolutely ghastly, not friendly, but I did nothing that is not written."

(The Ring runs from November 16 to December 12 at Adelaide's Festival Theatre.)

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