At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball bat and summoned a rainbow bridge of human bodies — crawling, abject, before the new lords of creation. It was pretty much what we’ve come to expect from BOC’s founder Graham Vick, a director who never hints at a contemporary social message when he can ramraid our consciousness with one. Here, though, there was another twist of the knife. The human bridge was made up of delivery couriers, complete with branded cagoules and cycle helmets. Didn’t someone describe lockdown as ‘middle-class people hiding while working-class people bring them things?’. A smart touch, and vintage Graham Vick.
Except Vick wasn’t there. He died three weeks ago from complications of Covid-19, just as rehearsals commenced. This staging was directed by his long-term BOC collaborator Richard Willacy, and it’s impossible to say how closely it resembled Vick’s vision, in as far as he’d tied anything down.
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