Immigrating Dutchman in Leeds

Annabel Arden transforms Wagner's Romantic Opera into an analogy of the plight of refugees

Striking image: Layla Claire’s predatory Senta, spills wine into Robert Hayward’s Dutchman’s glass Picture © James Glossop

Whatever one thinks of Annabel Arden’s attempt to make Wagner’s first established masterpiece a paradigm for the UK’s immigration ‘crisis’ - a too complex issue to cram into the two hours and forty minutes of Der fliegende Holländer - it would be wrong to underestimate the heroic achievement of an embattled company in mounting even this most manageable of the composer’s music dramas in the current financial climate.

From the moment the Opera North orchestra strikes up the turbulent string tremolo of the overture, and the subsequent chorus of ‘sailors’ sings its collective heart out, it is clear that, despite Arts Council-imposed cuts, the Leeds-based company is in fine fettle. Orchestra and chorus are its lifeblood, and their thrilling commitment, stirring up a storm in Wagner’s tempestuous orchestral and choral writing, is sufficient justification for tackling this piece, for a company with modest resources.

Under its previous music director, Richard Farnes, Opera North conceived a memorable series of ‘concert stagings’ of big Wagner (and Strauss) operas, including a universally acclaimed Ring, but his successor Garry Walker is right to return Wagner to Leeds’s Grand Theatre - especially Der fliegende Holländer, written for the first, less-than-grand Semperoper in Dresden where the composer was a Kapellmeister in the early 1840s. Arden’s staging attempts to update the ‘spook’ quality of the Dutchman’s tale (a natural descendant of Weber’s Der Freischütz and Marschner’s Der Vampyr), for contemporary consumption but her immigration theme never quite hits the target. The opening scene is set in ‘The Home Office’, with Daland as Secretary of State amid minions working on digital data. The alcohol-fuelled carousings of his civil servants may suggests a light-hearted satire on Boris Johnson’s notorious lockdown Downing Street parties, but the arrival of the Dutchman presents us with a down-and-out figure in a shabby old greatcoat and battered hat - hardly the dripping-with-gold catch that Daland imagines for his daughter Senta.