The first thing we see is the feet. They sway gently, forward and back, as the curtain slowly rises on the third instalment of Wagner’s Ring cycle to reveal their owner, sat on a swing hanging from a gnarled tree. Wedged precariously in its scorched branches is the treehouse where the dwarf Mime has been raising the hero-in-waiting Siegfried.
And whose feet are they? If you’ve been following Barrie Kosky’s production of the Ring since it began with Das Rheingold two and a half years ago, you won’t need me to tell you that they belong to Erda, the earth goddess. Again, she’s a silent but mesmerising presence courtesy of the octogenarian actor Illona Linthwaite. And again she is on stage, naked, for most of this opera’s four-and-a-half hours: smiling at Siegfried as the sparks fly from the sword he’s reforging on a Heath Robinson furnace in the first act; serenely tending the flowers that carpet the meadow where he eventually awakens Brünnhilde in the final act.
