There used to be a magazine called The Modern Review based on the jolly idea of treating trashy pop culture with serious intellectual rigour. Director Richard Jones takes the opposite path: giving high culture the trash treatment. He refuses to take Wagner seriously – until he’s actually forced to by the weight of subject matter. This has been going on since the Ring he directed for Covent Garden in the Nineties. From the look of things in this new ENO production, Jones’ view hasn’t changed much.

But is it fruitful to undercut Wagner’s fantastically grandiose music by illustrating it with lowlifes in spandex and tat? Wagner gives Wotan music befitting the king of the gods, but actually he’s a spiv and a chancer, and Jones won’t let us forget. You might find this juxtaposition brilliant, infuriating, inspired, childish. But we’ve always known that the Ring is a bit of a soap opera, and Jones (arguably) is simply making that more than usually obvious.

ENO already performed Valkyrie over a year ago, so we sort of know where things are going. That Valkyrie turned out to be a much better show than it looked on a grim opening night, with a proper grip on the way Brünnhilde and Wotan begin to figure out what to do about the whole terrible mess that Wotan has done so much to create.

Julian Hubbard, Blake Denson, John Relyea and Madeleine Shaw (photo: Marc Brenner)

Here, Wotan – John Relyea taking over from Valkyrie’s Matthew Rose – was rocking a kind of Nick Cave look, with slicked hair and shiny suit. The ascent of man to this elevated state was depicted by cavemen dragging tree-stumps across the stage, evolving into Wotan with his spear. Unfortunately it took place during the magical intro, which should really happen in pitch dark, so the creation of the world was unhelpfully titivated with audience sniggers.

The jokey tone continued as we met the family, a bunch of grasping petty-bourgeois with tragic taste. But amid the cartoonish visuals and Primark clobber Jones is perceptibly back to something like his old form. The first scene is usually a dreadful way to kick off the 16-hour cycle, the would-be playful music and scenario incredibly leaden and unfunny, the poor Rhinemaidens subjected to all manner of indignities by the composer: not here. Jones rescued it with originality and stagecraft and Sarah Fahie’s choreographed movement, with a striking representation of the gold as a human baby. The whole thing was set alight by the brilliantly concentrated unpleasantness of Leigh Melrose’s Alberich, whose thwarted advances to the slippery girls prompted his red-mist, destructive tantrum and nihilist rage that crystallise the Ring’s big theme of love vs money.

Jones makes you notice big moments for the first. As Loge sings of his worldwide researches into the motivation of humans, the music paused then melted into a magical refulgence as the idea of love materialises. Soon, a genuine, rather sweet bond emerged between the abused Freia and Fasolt. This, inevitably, was destroyed by money: the gold and its concomitant curse on love (literal and figurative) already in operation. And that prefiguring of the Ring’s true subject is what rescued this staging from (extremely diverting) banality. With designers Stewart Laing and Adam Silverman, Jones created a surface of lamé tracksuits, showers of rainbow glitter, tinselly curtains; the characterisation was a joy, most of all in Frederick Ballentine’s extremely slippery and bumptious Loge. There were no weak links in the cast, and outstanding performances from John Relyea as Wotan, Madeleine Shaw as the shallow wife Fricka, John Findon as whining Mime, Christine Rice as the earth-sprite Erda who brought things to a juddering halt with her weighty prophecies of doom.

And the expanded orchestra sounded fabulous under Martyn Brabbins’ measured but entirely convincing leadership. It’s a massive musical achievement, done with exceptional professionalism, every musical nuance in place, and some sensible hi-tech solutions too to (for example) the usual weedy anvils. On a night like this, nobody says the Coliseum is too big. It was packed – the first time I’ve seen it like that outside an opening night for years – and roared to the rafters at the end, almost like the old days. 

Music ★★★★★

Staging ★★★★★