Honey, I Shrunk the ‘Ring’ Cycle: Tash Siddiqui senses an uneasy alliance between cabaret and high drama in a potted version of Wagner’s tetralogy

Review of The Rinse Cycle, directed Binstock, conducted Lim, Charing Cross Theatre, London, 2016.

July 2016, Volume 10, Number 2, 61–3.

‘This is taking forever – I shouldn’t have put the load on the Ring cycle.’ So says a disgruntled laundrette patron, staring glumly at a washing machine containing his revolving smalls. Mexican artist Pablo Helguera’s cartoon was apparently the inspiration for Unexpected Opera’s The Rinse Cycle, described as ‘Wagner’s Ring cycle conditioned with comedy and shrunk to 2 hours’. I stand to be corrected, but as far as I am aware this is the first Ring production to be staged in a laundrette – complete with industrial-scale washing machines branded Bish, Bash and Bosh – although, as regular readers of The Wagner Journal will no doubt agree, there have been far stranger production concepts than this.