Wagner rewilded: Das Rheingold, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

In Northern Ireland Opera’s new Tosca, the curtain rises on a big concrete dish from which a pair of eyes gaze down, impassive. Walls of scaffolding tower on three sides of the stage, creaking as they expand under the heat of the stage lights. Point taken: Cameron Menzies’s production (the sets are by Niall McKeever) is a semi-abstract updating. It’s a fairly standard contemporary approach to Puccini’s Napoleonic thriller, though whether you get the full impact that comes with a more period-specific setting – that sense of individuals being crushed beneath the wheels of history – is another question. 

Anyway, that’s just how things are now and regular operagoers will be used to decoding the various surreal anachronisms that arise whenever a director sets out to cobble together a synthetic reality. Menzies does generate a potent atmosphere of entrapment and menace, and it’s a pity that he blunts the opera’s ending, with Cavaradossi picked off by cloaked figures on top of a sort of gantry, and Tosca throwing herself down the same flight of stairs that we’ve just seen Cavaradossi ascend.