New Wagner production will boast three dimensional sets as well as characters.

It’s fair to say that opera fans can be an obsessive bunch, with Wagner opera fans frequently the nuttiest in the fruitcake shop. It’s the Wagnerites who seem prepared to travel the furthest to get their fixes; it’s the Wagnerites who argue longest and loudest after a performance about the relative merits of everything from the singers’ notes to the program notes; and oddly enough, it’s the Wagnerites who are most regularly confronted with a controversial director’s vision putting a spin on one of the revered master’s masterpieces.

Melbourne looks likely to be the prime haven for the Australian Wagner lover in the immediate years ahead (Lyndon Terracini has pretty much ruled it out in the cramped confines of the Sydney Opera House), and Victorian Opera are the latest to take up the gauntlet, with a radical new production of The Flying Dutchman about to open at St Kilda’s iconic Palais Theatre. But this is radical with a difference. Don’t expect the chorus to be dressed as giant lab rats or Senta to give birth in the final scene. The novelty of director Roger Hodgman’s production will...