Games of Thrones: Matthew Rye witnesses different examples of power-play in part of an ongoing ‘Ring’, a standalone ‘Götterdämmerung’ and a paganist ‘Lohengrin’

It is not always easy to dip into a Ring cycle mid-flow, as it were. Not having seen the Rheingold in Michael Dietz’s ongoing cycle for Staatstheater Kassel put me at a disadvantage when coming to terms with his staging of Die Walküre. His approach, in spacious designs by Mayke Hegger, is a mixture of the abstract and the concrete, without any sense of a specific milieu but with telltale indications of the contemporary.