GERMAN OPERA - Tristan und Isolde

Wagner called it his most dangerous work — a score built, by his own account, on a philosophy in which desire is not fulfilment but suffering, a force that hollows out everyone it touches. Most productions stage this as tragic romance. BK Opera does not.

Directed by the award-winning Kate Millett, her production returns to Schopenhauer's darker premise and follows it to its conclusion. At its centre is not fate, but cowardice: a man who chooses silence over truth, and death over confronting what he has done, again and again, until there is none left standing who has not been destroyed by his avoidance. Isolde is not swept along by love but driven by a rage and shame she cannot outrun, even when she can see with sudden, terrible clarity exactly what is happening to her. What the audience is given, at first, is beautiful. What it becomes is something else entirely.

With such an intimate staging, Wagner's sound is not only heard but physically felt. There is no remove between the singers and those watching, or between the audience and what unfolds. This is not a Tristan und Isolde to be admired from a comfortable distance. It is one to be survived.

Renowned Wagnerian stars, James Egglestone and Lee Abrahmsen lead as Tristan and Isolde, joined by Warwick Fyfe as King Marke, Alison Lemoh as Brangäne, Henry Shaw as Kurwenal, Daniel Sziesong Todd as Melot, and James Penn as the Steersman and Shepherd, under the baton of Kelly Lovelady.

This production will be performed in German, with English surtitles, cut to two and a half hours with a two-piano reduction.

29 and 31 October, Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre.