Storming the Temple: Frank Castorf’s new ‘Ring’ is an assault as much on the Bayreuth audience as on oil-fuelled capitalism, reports Barry Millington

Review of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed Castorf, conducted Kirill Petrenko, Bayreuth, 2013.  

November 2013, Volume 7, Number 3, 82–8.

A narrative has developed about Bayreuth in the English- and German-speaking media over the last few months that goes something like this. The Bayreuth Festival, and even its associated structures such as the Festpielhaus and Haus Wahnfried, are going to rack and ruin. That the latter is a building site in the bicentenary year is a disgrace but scarcely surprising under the regime of the half-sisters Katherina and Eva, who are presiding over a disastrous decline. The new production of the Ring, by the theatrical provocateur Frank Castorf, of the radical Volksbühne in Berlin, is the final straw.