Forged in the White Heat of Revolution: Matthew Rye reports that an experimental festival production taking liberties with Wagner’s ‘Vorabend’ leaves more questions than it answers

Review of Das Rheingold, directed Simons, conducted Currentzis, Bochum, 2015.

March 2016, Volume 10, Number 1, 59–61.

For his first major production as artistic director of the Ruhr Triennale for 2015–17, Dutchman Johan Simons staged Das Rheingold in a former gas turbine hall, a building originally used to provide the heat for the neighbouring steel works’ blast furnaces. A site of exploitation of both natural resources and manpower: the perfect venue for a critique of capitalism. As Simons remarks in the programme, ‘In Das Rheingold Wagner told the history of the Ruhr. A story of industrialisation that destroys nature, of labour and exploitation and finally the fall of the powerful.’ The director’s aim was to return Wagner’s drama to the crucible of revolutionary ideas from which it was born in the late 1840s, and, taking advantage of a festival situation where experimentation is expected, he did more than simply stage Das Rheingold as it stands.