★★★★½ Vocal heroics and visual magic in Armfield’s theatrical Siegfried.

Arts Centre Melbourne
November 25, 2016

Ever heard the tenor join Brünnhilde on her top C at the end of Siegfried? Stefan Vinke’s superhuman final fling was just one of many miraculous moments in Neil Armfield’s hyper-theatrical staging of the most magical opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

^{Jud Arthur as Fafner. Photos by Jeff Busby}

Throughout his Ring, Armfield has used theatrical smoke and mirrors to represent the magic in the Germanic mythological tale. Show girls and cheap vaudeville tricks, he seems to be saying, are all that this fag end of humanity have left to buy into. In Siegfried, he goes the whole hog, setting each act within a proscenium arch to emphasise the theatricality of the situations. In Robert Cousin’s clean-limbed set design, Mime’s cave (here, a dilapidated modern man-cave) is seen as a place of playacting where Siegfried has been brought up on tall tales and make-believe. Fafner is shown as a fading actor applying the motley and practising unconvincing snarls in a mirror. His tired circus show is near the end of its tether, his...