13895 Wagner News 174 - Wagner Society of England

she reads, her fantasy overwhelms the reality of her dull attic room, and video projections
of a storm-tossed ship at sea engulf the stage.
The set opens out to what appears to be the bowels of a modern ocean-going tanker,
and the sailors mill about, securing the ship from the storm. Senta sits on her bed at the
centre of the stage and watches them, fascinated, while they are oblivious to her presence.
When Daland addresses his crew from an upper balcony, she stands on the bed, straight
and tall, overwhelmingly proud at being a member of his ship’s company at last. Left alone,
the exhausted Steersman sings and falls asleep on the floor. Senta gently lays her gailycoloured
duvet over him and carefully covers her bed with a sheet. As the Dutchman’s
theme thunders forth, the back wall of the set opens and the prow of the crimson-sailed
ship, now life-sized, crashes through. It is one of the most stunning visual effects I have
seen in all my years of opera-going. But just as one expects the Dutchman to emerge from
his ship, Senta peels the bed-sheet back to reveal him lying asleep on her bed, newly
conjured into this world of her dreams by the intensity of her imagination – not the
haggard, shaggy sea-wanderer we normally see, but an elegant, handsome, Byronic, even
Onegin-like figure in Victorian civilian clothes with flowing dark hair, a young girl’s
romantic dream. He rises, moves to the edge of the bed, and sits there, lamenting his fate,
while she watches him. She is so close that she could reach out and touch him, yet she is
as far from him as though they were in different worlds. She is the enraptured witness of
his encounter with her father – her ideal real and fantasy men together – and the
Dutchman’s plea for her hand in marriage, before she contentedly goes to sleep beneath
the duvet (which has been replaced on the bed) as the Dutchman boards his ship and
Daland’s crew assemble at the front of the stage, obscuring the bed from our view.
When they disperse the setting of Senta’s attic room has returned, and the hand
which reaches out from beneath the duvet is that of a woman. Senta has grown up, but
she is still in the grip of her fantasies: her beloved book, its cover now tatty and worn, is
still her constant companion, and when she reluctantly gets up, dresses, and prepares to
go to work, she takes it with her, passionately kissing the Dutchman’s image on the cover.
But the next scene shows the harsh reality of her
adult life. Her colleagues are not spinners but
workers in a shoddy factory which churns out model
ships in bottles, with crimson sails: her obsession
follows her even here. The hum of the spinning
wheels is replaced by the whine of conveyer belts.
Senta’s job is to stamp a price label on each bottle,
but she is too engrossed in her book even to carry
out this simple task. Her fellow workers mock her,
and her singing of the Ballad (which they have
obviously heard many times before) is for them an
excuse to knock off for a few minutes to gossip, eat
sandwiches, read magazines, do anything but listen
to her, except to make fun of her when they sing the
chorus. Erik, a lumpen security guard, is the very
antithesis of the Dutchman – perhaps his
relationship with her is the result of a futile effort on
her part to relate to the world around her.
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