I was, in my younger years, intimately involved with an undergraduate thesis about the Romantic roots and heritage of Richard Wagner's art and thought.

So when I heard that the KL Performing Arts Centre were staging a five-hour Chinese version of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a series of four epic music dramas that took the composer 26 years to complete, I had to be there.

Five hours, seven actors, many roles... This is an astonishing feat by anyone's reckoning, and Director Deric Gan and the entire cast deserve praise for endurance as well as innovation.





The set was very spare, with a lot of focus on cage-like rooms and furniture, and wheeled beds (characters were more likely to die on operating tables than in battle scenes).

Following the byzantine plot is not necessarily easy (nor is it in the original, of course). I found I remembered very little from my acquaintance of 38 years ago, and the flash-forwards sometimes caught me out. But with a bit of concentration you can keep up with the mythic tide.

The setting is broadly contemporary. The gods have videophones; the terrible twins, Gunther and Gutrune, have a transistor; and "scanners" conveniently retrieve the details of characters for our orientation.

But we haven't left the middle ages too far behind. The underlings still fight with swords, approve of forced marriages, and die in childbirth. Then again, maybe that's pretty contemporary, too...

There was plenty of humour, and a couple of bits of audience participation (all probably necessary when you have to engage your public for five whole hours).

And I liked the overall not-too-serious approach. In the area where you wait to go in, there were "survival guides" and crib sheets. And after two and a half hours (the first two acts), we had a 30-minute interval, with complimentary water, mooncakes -- and Power Rings!





The third act did some recapitulating, and then filled in everything we didn't yet know about the Brunnhilde-Siegfried debacle. The fourth and final act was very short. The prolonged wheeling of trolleys (accompanied by Siegfried's Funeral March) indicated that the gods and their entourage were dead (we weren't too sorry about that), and a decades-hence beachside scene proved that the reincarnated Siegfried and Brunnhilde -- despite the blandishments of the always elegant, high-heeled Fate -- want nothing to do with any rings of power.

This was far from the transcendent Gesamtkunstwerk that Wagner envisaged. But it was a very enjoyable experience, and ample testimony to the power of myth to reach across time, language, and culture.