OperaUpClose’s new production is not quite the opera as Wagner conceived it. The myth of the seaman condemned for eternity to sail the seas unless redeemed by love has been reconceived as a contemporary piece with political resonance. In a dystopian England hardening its borders, hostile to those seeking refuge, the Dutchman is a traumatised mariner who is a people-smuggler and Senta becomes Starlight, one of the vigilant volunteers out on the white cliffs, who has misgivings about the mission to “shield the island from invasion”.
When director Lucy Bradley originally conceived the idea – pre-pandemic – there was no inkling that, by the time the project came to fruition, the Home Office would have set in train such draconian anti-immigration measures as to make the imagined dystopia all too real. By way of underlining the opera’s coastal and maritime context, the company is touring at venues in historic seaports and, at a time when ships are being fitted out to house asylum seekers, no setting could be more symbolic than Brunel’s SS Great Britain in Bristol, the steamship rescued from the South Atlantic and restored as a monument to past glories.
