Ring Cycle
[put the name of an opera in my inbox, and I’ll tell you how I would direct it/what my production concept(s) would be]
Oh maaaannnn hit me with a big one there
I actually have a strong idea for the Ring Cycle, but it’s not quite a production concept per se. I’m of the opinion that the Cycle should be done in a self-critical manner; it’s complex, multilayered, relevant to today’s society, and of course was written by a pretty awful person. A naturalistic production, I think, diminishes the work’s value and makes it too easy to interpret as a museum piece. There’s also the aspect that Bayreuth realized early on after the WWII, when they ditched the naturalistic Nazi-style productions in favor of regietheater, that the associations with a purely straightforward retelling of the story is too easily assimilated by right-wing nationalists. That being said, it’s hard to bring people into a work as vast as the ring cycle if they don’t understand the “vanilla” experience of a straightforward production--when Siegfried is a baby and the giants are the proletariat or robots or whatever, it can be hard for someone going in to figure out what the original source material was and they can get lost, even missing whatever important subversions are going on in any given production.
Therefore, I propose a compromise. I would like to direct a ring cycle for film. A huge budget, LOTR-style high fantasy production with full and absolute mythic naturalism, to be used as a reference for understanding the more self-critical live versions found on opera stages. With a high budget and special effects, my hope would be that it would be spectacular enough to remove any incentive to be “naturalistic” onstage--live effects simply can’t compete with a CG dragon, after all--and it would leave directors free to pursue interpretations that are far more interesting and subversive without worrying about leaving audiences in the dark. Plus, it would be neat to see on film and would introduce whole new audiences to opera who would have never been interested otherwise.
