Reservoir Gods: Barrie Kosky’s new production of ‘Das Rheingold’ reminds Richard Laing that we’re all doomed

We’re going to disappear from the Earth, Barrie Kosky tells us in the printed programme for his new production of Das Rheingold at the Royal Opera House. ‘The world’s going to burn and then flood.’ In case we need reminding of this sobering fact (and we probably do), the day before opening night Cyclone Daniel’s battering of Libya led to the failure of two dams and the deaths of thousands. Here we have an example of what the novelist William Boyd called ‘zemblanity’: ‘the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and unexpected discoveries’; or in William Safire’s words, ‘the inexorable discovery of what we don’t want to know’.