I
n English National Opera’s new
production of Wagner’s Ring all
the cast are new to their roles —
with one welcome exception. The
soprano Rachel Nicholls is making
a return to the role of Brünnhilde,
in Richard Jones’s production con-
ducted by Martyn Brabbins. Her ascent
to the pinnacle of heroic Wagnerian
roles has been gradual and patient.
I remember attending a performance
of Die Walküre at Longborough Festival
Opera — the “Bayreuth of the Cotswolds”
— and having to check the programme
to discover who the singer of Brünnhil-
de’s Valkyrie sister Helmwige was. It
was Nicholls, clearly en route to bigger
assignments. Longborough offered her
the Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde in
2012, and complete Ring cycles the
following year.
In the same year she learnt both
Senta (in Wagner’s The Flying Dutch-
man) and Beethoven’s Fidelio. “That’s
a lot of big new roles, plus Verdi’s Lady
Macbeth,” she says, with a smile. “Since
then I’ve done the three operas individ-
ually, including Siegfried with Mark
Elder and the Hallé, which we recorded.”
Nicholls already has a contract for
Siegfried, the next Ring opera after
Valkyrie, though not yet for Götterdäm-
merung. But it would be very surprising
if that isn’t announced soon.
What was originally planned as a
one-off Valkyrie, directed by Daniel
Kramer, became all four operas in a co-
production with New York’s Metropoli-
tan Opera when ENO’s Annilese Mis-
kimmon succeeded Kramer as artistic
director in 2020. If the company can
get sponsors, it will present complete
cycles, probably before the Royal
Opera’s new Ring is completed circa
2026/27.
Nicholls is excited about the pros-
pect. “I’m aware that I’m very lucky to
be working here, they have to share out
roles, so I’m not taking anything for
granted.”
Her back story is unconventional for
a Wagner heroine. Her early career was
almost entirely non-operatic, a concert
singer specialising in the baroque
masters Bach and Handel. Anne Evans,
her Wagnerian mentor since 2012, told
me that when she first heard her,
“Rachel was using approximately 25
per cent of her voice”.
Her only previous ENO appearances
were as Eva in The Mastersingers ofA VA LK
Rachel Nicholls tells
Hugh Canning about her
ascent to the Wagnerian
pinnacle as Brünnhilde
DAVID SHOUKRY/ENGLISH PHOTOWORKS, ALAMYThree shows this week:
one frightened me, one was
ahead of its time and one was
annoying but short. I can’t say I
enjoyed watching any of them,
but all three left an impression.
The Ocean at the End of
the Lane, which has moved
from the National Theatre
to the West End, is a
supernatural goose-pimpler.
Neil Gaiman’s 2013 fantasy
novel tells of a lonely boy
( James Bamford, excellent)
who encounters a peculiar
family of women with dodgy
West Country accents. The
Hempstocks are white witches
who know how to fight beings
that enter our world through
rips in time. These may be
meddlesome ghosts or they
Screams galore await in the stage version of a Neil Gaiman
novel, plus a dated Joe Penhall play and a double-header
may be giant, corvid
scavengers called Hunger
Birds, depicted by terrifying
black puppets. There is also a
squid-like creature. It jabs the
boy in the hand and injects
him with a worm that turns
out to be a hostile invader.
Don’t tell the anti-vaxxers.
The ghoulery is done well, a
team of anonymous, black-
clad performers carrying off
the other-worldly spooks with
artful choreography amid
dramatic lighting and
collywobblying sound effects.
If I hadn’t been in a
prominent part of the stalls,
and representing your fine
newspaper, I would have been
screaming behind my fingers
and legging it for the exit long
before the Hunger Birds had
finished pecking at some
unfortunate’s innards. Nia
Towle is sweet and assured as
the youngest Hempstock, and
Nicolas Tennant plays both
the boy’s father and the boy in
adult years, for much of the
story is flashback. Tennant is
perfect as a weary, crumpled
widower struggling to keep
failure at bay. Gaiman’s story
is a modern take on the
Narnia stories, but he
is less optimistic and
charming than
CS Lewis, and
I wouldn’t take
children to this
show. The grungy
darkness of KatyRudd’s production gets you
down after a while, even
though it is skilfully done.
Joe Penhall’s play Blue/
Orange plunges us further
into glumness, this time in a
psychiatric unit where a black
patient (Michael Balogun)
with borderline personality
disorder is being assessed for
release by a young white
doctor (Ralph Davis). The
supervising consultant (Giles
Terera) turns up and is initially
suave before turning into a
career-polishing monster who
plays various race-prejudice
theories to unsettle his
younger colleague.
Some things date the play,
not least the amount of
smoking. After the last
budget, it must be costing
them a fortune. The
carelessness with which the
younger doctor talks about his
patient’s colour also rings
untrue today, shrivelled as we
are by the neo-McCarthyite
terrors of race correctness.
Some of the arguments about
psychiatric assessment and
care go on for too long,
despite the crispness of James
Dacre’s clinical production. It
is hard to care much about all
three characters. And yet
Penhall was ahead of his time
with this piece 21 years ago.
He was alighting on an
arrogance in the medical
profession that has recently
become glaringly apparent.
“I am the authority,” Terera’s
consultant booms. He could
almost be a member of Sage.
Samuel Beckett’s vignette
Footfalls is the one in which
a woman keeps walking
across the stage — nine steps
to the left, nine to the right.
It is a metaphor for dreary
meaninglessness, at which old
Sam arguably excelled. Its
partner piece Rockaby gives
us a dying woman in her
rocking chair, occasionally
saying “more” to signal
another stanza of circular,
hypnotic poetry.
Pretentious phooey or a
capsule of truth? Maybe both.
At 40 minutes, these two
pieces hardly outstay their
welcome. The Jermyn Street’s
Rockaby is worth seeing for the
performance of Siân Phillips,- It is hard to take your
eyes off her waxen, ageless,
everyman face. She does little
more, in that spotlight, than
open and close her eyes, rock a
little, take the odd, exhausted
gulp and say “more”. And yet
she has immense star quality. c
THE
CRITICS
QUENTIN
LETTS
The Ocean at the End
of the Lane
Duke of York’s, WC
HHHH
Blue/Orange
Ustinov Theatre Bath, & touring
HH
Footfalls & Rockaby
Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1,
& touring
HHH
Scary stuff Nia Towle
and James Bamford
in The Ocean at the
End of the LaneOnly for the brave
THEATRE | OPERA
MANUEL HARLANI wouldn’t
take
children
to this
show