It’s amazing how many people, on hearing I was going to see The Flying Dutchman, gave the same response – “At least that’s one of Wagner’s shorter operas.” Yup, it may not go to the same bladder-testing lengths as The Ring Cycle, but its taut three-act format generates a blasting intensity of emotion emanating from the composer’s adaptation of an old Dutch legend concerning an endlessly travelling ghost ship into an epic musical statement about destiny, love and sacrifice.

The temptation to tie this tale of perilous tides and forsaken souls to modern issues of displacement, immigration and dangerous acts of desperation was, I can see, too powerful to resist. It really isn’t, however, relevant to the universal power of Wagner’s drama to hammer home the message quite so bluntly. No, the women are not sorting refugee packages, and the story doesn’t open in the Home Office, and for first-time viewers this might lead to some justifiable confusion. Of course such connections can be made, but they are intrinsic to the nature of the work, and were better expressed in the watery projections of the ocean than in clumsy changes to the action. Despite this the music and performances were magnificent, especially in Act II where the Dutchman, cursed to roam forever, realises that Senta, the girl who has agreed to marry him, already occupies an imaginative world in which he is her destiny and desire. Robert Hayward played the Dutchman as a timeless, ragged phantom of a man, so deep in despair that he could almost reject the salvation he had been seeking, while Layla Claire’s interpretation of Senta as woman willingly embracing a fate that must remove her from the familiar world to a more powerful, resonant other-worldly truth could hardly have been bettered.

Theatre Royal