Doomed Dutchman wants a wife: Wagner makes Opera Holland Park debut

It’s a bold move for anyone to open their new season with their first ever Wagner opera – least of all the one whose titular ship is the portent of doom – but Opera Holland Park embraced the challenge as well as the rough winds of late May, which on opening night added to the general sense of heading bravely into choppy waters.

The challenge is not insignificant in this intimate but problematic venue, whose wide and exposing stage offers little opportunity for dramatic subterfuge and where acoustics are subject to the prevailing weather. Wagner’s most concise opera nevertheless demands attention to the emotional complexity that makes the relationships throughout his oeuvre so compelling. Team Holland Park has wisely gone for a traditional storytelling approach – no shoe-horning it into a government department, for example, nor inquiry into how exactly a ship’s captain damned to eternity while circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope at the height of the Dutch Golden Age might have come by all that treasure. Julia Burbach’s production focuses firmly on the unsettling bond between Senta and her cursed mariner. 

The Dutchman has previous: every seven years he’s allowed to come ashore to find a wife worthy enough to break the curse, and more than a dozen identical cast-offs appear, whose long hair and long beige macs over long white dresses are very much the blank canvas look of an Instagram trad-wife-to-be, in case you’re thinking that Wagner’s tiresome inventory of the perfect bride remains safely anchored in his 1843 libretto. Spending the first act in bed on Naomi Dawson’s capsized house-cum-ship set suggests Senta is already fatefully wedded to her morbid fantasy with nothing else for her to do but lie in wait for her man. It nearly works, but with Senta so firmly ensconced in the ship-like structure, her seafaring demon lover must arrive not looming menacingly at the ship’s prow, but moodily beneath it, and on foot. 

It’s one of several odd moments of mismatch of stage to score. Much of the action, where intensity is perhaps intended, is pedestrian. There is a lot of walking. As Senta and the Dutchman pledge themselves to each other in their climactic duet, he kneels before her and... opens a trapdoor at her feet and they climb down a ladder. Oddest of all, Senta and the Dutchman leave in opposite directions at the end, she up the stairs to the back of the auditorium, while he disappears into the blackness of the orchestra. Intentionally or otherwise, this offers a tempting dramaturgical possibility and an ending more thought-provoking than Wagner’s. What if the curse isn’t lifted? What if Senta is one of a continuum?

Every outdoor director knows that if you get the chorus right it’s plain sailing, and there is plenty of lusty yo-hoing from the men at sea, a lively array of hipster seamstresses watching for their return and an exuberant drinking session to celebrate the dubious union that was so rollicking on opening night that conductor Peter Selwyn all but intervened. Boisterousness can easily overwhelm ensemble and this was a problem in other places, too, added to which so much of Wagner’s dynamic subtlety, which does so much of the work in finding the psychological depth of his characters, must needs be comprised in the open air. However, the drama of Wagner’s score is inescapable, whatever compromises you have to make, and combined with the timely interventions of the wind in Holland Park’s ‘sails’ it all made for a genuinely thrilling gothic atmosphere. The City of London Sinfonia gave a dramatic account of the well-loved overture and its familiar brassy portents, but were at their best in Wagner’s quieter, sweeter passages, all those fragile, romantic interludes about love and marriage that he so enjoyed bookending with ruin.

Eleanor Dennis sang the role of Senta magnificently, her expressive dynamic range one of the few elements of this production to broke no compromise: hers is a voice with plenty more treasure yet in the hold. Paul Carey Jones was commanding, if uni-dimensional, as the Dutchman (both principals could have done with some more imaginative direction) and Robert Winslade Anderson was a charismatic, upbeat Daland. Neal Cooper brought great dramatic energy to the dogged Erik, even if persistence and weather conditions pushed him a little too far as he pleaded with his love to stay on shore. 

Wagner needs no converts, but for entry level this is a good start.