A ‘Holländer’ for the Credit Crunch: Tash Siddiqui is impressed by the new production at Covent Garden

This bleak, sombre reading of Der fliegende Holländer will probably have disappointed those familiar with the bells and whistles of recent German productions, culminating in Peter Konwitschny’s provocative 2004 Munich staging (reviewed in its 2008 revival by Barry Millington in The Wagner Journal, ii/3, 77–80). Tim Albery’s production eschews overt theatricality in favour of understated social realism, and his approach does result in moments of ennui in the course of the unbroken two-and-a-half-hour performance. Yet there is something admirable in Albery’s refusal to engage in cheap phantasmagoria, and by the end I found myself in a kind of ecstasy at the sheer unrelieved grimness of everything.