Wagner

There are no two ways about it: Wagner’s Ring cycle, the biggest challenge that any opera company can face, has been mounted with triumphant success in Longborough, and now presumably has been laid to rest. Nine years ago, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, I saw the first attempt to stage it, in Jonathan Dove’s drastically cut version, and with skeletonic orchestration, and though there was some decent singing, on the whole I was unimpressed. I couldn’t believe that during the course of the following decade Martin and Lizzie Graham would succeed in turning a large chicken shed in Gloucestershire into a comfortable theatre, seating more than 400 spectators, and with

Sir Alfred Munnings lived his life in true bohemian style, ‘carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road’. Summer in February is based on his early life living in Cornwall, with Munnings played by Dominic Cooper: ‘Irrepressible as an electric eel, and twice as dangerous’. But does the film live up to Munnings’ art – and, of course, to the hype? The problem with films about artists is, says Andrew Lambirth, the art. But Summer in February is ‘as vivid and visually complex as a Munnings masterpiece’ – in fact, almost as good as the book. Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, on at the Lyttleton, has been

In Act II of Lohengrin, after the villainess Ortrud has interrupted the procession to the Minster, and sown the seeds of doubt in Elsa’s mind about the provenance of her rescuer, Lohengrin himself appears and comforts Elsa, saying, ‘Come! Let your tears of sorrow become ones of joy.’ That is followed by a solemn quiet passage, only 11 bars long, and unrelated to anything we have heard before or will hear subsequently, but of such grave beauty that it makes you, too, cry. This kind of pathos and nobility permeate Lohengrin, and though each of Wagner’s dramas has its own feel and colour, those of this opera are so wonderful