Sphinx

If you hang a pistol on the wall in the first act of a play, Chekhov remarked, you need someone to fire it in the next act. On the same principle, if you build a big set of the New York Stock Exchange for Götterdämmerung, you’re going to burn it down at the end. Unless, of course, you’re Frank Castorf, in his Bayreuth production of the Ring that reached its conclusion this year. What did you expect – fire, flood, revolution, the destruction of the old order and the birth of the new? People die: Siegfried, Brünnhilde, Günther, the unnamed ‘everyman’ character who’s reappeared in every episode. The system, however, endures, as it was always likely to; the gods may have thoughtlessly set events in motion, and supplied the weapons of destruction, but they are at best mildly inconvenienced.

The idea that Castorf “baulks” at setting fire to the New York Stock Exchange, as Hugh Canning suggested in a review for the Torygraph, is simply absurd. This is, after all, the man who gave Siegfried an AK47 in place of Nothung – actually the perfect symbol for putting awesome destructive power in the hands of idiotic mortals – and who concluded Siegfried with the unforgettable sight of a load of plastic crocodiles roaming Alexanderplatz. The failure of capitalism to collapse in flames is no act of directorial cowardice, shying away at the end from Wagner’s vision of cosmic and social apocalypse. It is the whole point. The revolution will not be televised, despite the ubiquity of video cameras and screens throughout the cycle. The war on heaven will not take place.

The inadequacy of Siegfried as an agent of true change is already well established in Wagner’s text; Castorf’s production, and Stefan Vinke’s performance, simply draw out his flaws more vividly. He is forceful, energetic, brash, vulgar, violent; too much in love with his own image as hero, all too easily tempted to enjoy the female spoils of his heroism. Hagen and Gutrune scarcely needed to use a potion to lead him astray – but would a better or brighter hero have had a better chance? The gods of historical materialism have the last laugh; Siegfried may have fled their gloomy world for the bright lights and opportunities of Berlin, but his freedom to act is shown to be tightly circumscribed. His power is no more than that of any man with a gun, to kill, intimidate and disrupt on a small and ultimately irrelevant scale; this sort of revolutionary gets you a bit of anarchist graffiti and a lot of minor damage to patio furniture. “Is Achilles possible with powder and lead?” Marx pondered in the Grundrisse; but not only is Siegfried merely a Penny Market Achilles, even a true hero would be impotent when the ‘enemy’ is not a dragon or warrior, or even a single representative of the gods, but the endlessly protean power of oil and money.

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And yet, this is a society ripe for collapse: corrupt, chaotic, alienating. The gods of Rheingold are all too human in their lusts, thoughtlessness and petty squabbling, caught up in a Coen Brothers spiral of escalating violence, deceit and chaos – but Wotan and his mob remain godlike, at least in the traditional Greek manner: vengeful, capricious, and ultimately unaffected by the consequences of their actions. Wotan is certainly not in control of events, or even of himself, but demands respect regardless, and bolsters his ego by exerting power over individuals, when he dares – especially over women.

We begin, as ever, somewhere in the middle of things, and expect then to see the consequences of events – the theft of the Rheingold, the forging of the ring, Alberich’s curse, Fafner’s murder of Fasolt – play out in sequence, culminating in the destruction of Valhalla. Instead, Castorf sends us back into the past: Walküre plays out in the early-mid twentieth century, in a rapidly changing world of old-fashioned faming, primitive oil drilling and expressionist cinema (the decision halfway through to make the setting more concrete, Azerbaijan in 1942, struck me as completely wrong; I’m happier to indulge my Coen Brothers fantasy and see the whole thing as a blend of Oh Brother Where Art Thou and There Will Be Blood…).

Is this Wotan the ancestor of the one in Rheingold, building the family fortune through violence and determination for his spoiled grandson to luxuriate in unearned power and put it all at risk through self-indulgence? Or are we simply seeing the gods manifest in different contexts, playing out the same cruel power games, never actually learning or changing? Certainly we see once again the workings of patriarchy, through Wotan’s obsession with family honour and control, and the narcissistic and incestuous undercurrents in his relationship with his enforcer daughter; and the cracks in the edifice, as his grip is rendered equally limp by Fricka’s emotional hold over him and by the naive idealism of his daughter leading her into rebellion when she realises the extent to which he is compromised.

Flashback, flash forward. We might see analogies here to Wagner’s use of motifs to recall or anticipate characters and themes across the cycle, but Castorf’s concern is not – as Wagner’s is generally assumed to have been – to emphasise the unity and interdependence of the whole, but to throw the relationship between different parts into question. The connections between events, let alone our perception or invention of cause and effect, are never a straightforward matter of chronological sequence. We think we know the story, and just want to see how the director adds a minor gloss to it by varying the setting; Castorf wants to undermine that certainty, to undermine the inexorability of narrative determinism.

We shouldn’t assume that revolution is going to come just because that’s how we think the story ends – or because that’s how we (and the looming faces of Marx, Lenin and the rest, and their disciples) think that’s how history ‘works’. Replacing an ideological narrative of the eternal and inevitable existence of capitalism with an ideological narrative of the inevitable triumph of communism isn’t actually going to get us anywhere; we may, as Marx did, be able to offer a powerful and persuasive account of why capitalism ought to collapse and must be overcome – but we need to recognise the multiple reasons why this has as yet failed to happen, and the many possible future worlds in which it will never happen – especially if we do not act, but simply expect events to play out in a way that suits us.

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Is Castorf’s Ring an anti-Wagner Ring, ostentatiously rejecting his persistent lapses into Romanticism – and the teleological power of his music – and offering instead a nihilistic quietism, an autobiographical journey from the illusory certainties and spiritual poverty of the DDR to the equally superficial delights and alienating consumerism of a reunified Germany – a Marxist nightmare, in which we see the bewitching power of money and the abuses of patriarchal power, but without any hope of waking up or otherwise escaping? Or does it work to uncover new possibilities in this enduringly complex work of art? The two are of course not mutually exclusive.

Burning down the New York Stock Exchange, satisfying though it might be, wouldn’t actually bring down capitalism. Wotan and the gods seem vulnerable in the Ring because they have placed so much of their power in a few objects that can be seized or broken; but this is revealed in Castorf’s version to be an illusion. As Herbert Marcuse, quoted by Mark Berry at the end of his review of Götterdämmerung, argued, “Authentic works of art… reject the promise made too easily; they reject the unburdened happy end”. Wagner’s closing bars are anything but triumphalist; and the final sight of Hagen, lost in thought or resignation, watched by the Rhinemaidens, matched them perfectly.

If there are elements here of the comic narrative, in which everything is disrupted only to return to its original form, same time next week, this is not the whole story. There is change, in sensibility if not the material conditions of society; not even Castorf messes with the journey of Brünnhilde from divinity to humanity, seeing through the tawdry glories and grubby compromises of the world of the gods and rejecting the controlling power of her father. Her suicide fails to shake the world, at least in the short term – but perhaps we can imagine this gesture of despair and defiance, her repudiation of the politics of money and power, growing in stature and meaning over time. Does it have no meaning, if it does not destroy Valhalla? Of course not.

If we had only Castorf’s Ring, there might be a problem – but no staging, however brilliant, is final. This Ring shows us in painful clarity that the overthrow of the current system is essential, but difficult, perhaps impossible. We have other versions, if we need them, to put greater emphasis on the strand of hope that Wagner also offers us, that the story of the future is never fully written.