Rainbow Bridge Over Troubled Water: With its future under threat, English National Opera serves up a ‘Rhinegold’ to treasure, writes Roland Matthews

For the second instalment of its planned Ring cycle English National Opera has gone back to the beginning, following its 2021 launch with The Valkyrie. Even further back, in fact, as the Coliseum curtain rises in silence to reveal a dumb show of a bearded man, wearing only a loincloth, dragging a large tree branch to and fro across the full width of a bare stage. Each time he emerges from the wings the branch is in an altered state: first stripped of foliage, then a log, a plank, until finally we see Wotan with his spear. This ‘previously on ...’ sequence of course references Wotan’s violation of the World Ash Tree.