Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Wagner’s Ring for people who can’t be bothered to sit through it
Rainer Hersch
Venue: The Royal Scots Club
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
“Wagner’s Ring for people who can’t be bothered to sit through it” tells you all you’ll ever need to know about this quartet of operas (that normally takes days to sit through) in under an hour with just a man, a piano and an impeccably researched and compiled multi-media presentation. Oh, and an interesting box of props. And five bicycle pumps, each attached to a bike horn and accompanied by a pair of ear defenders. Curious? Read on…….
Review
Getting down into the Speakeasy in the bowels of the Royal Scots Club takes nearly as long and the same number of twists and turns as the subject matter we’ve rolled up to see, Rainer Hersch’s splendid exploration of The Ring of the Nibelung. This is Wagner’s epic tetralogy that seems to last for about a week but theoretically takes only about the average waking day to watch, provided you’re capable of sitting that long without a toilet or refreshment break.
But Hersch promises that his “Wagner’s Ring for people who can’t be bothered to sit through it” will tell us all we’ll ever need to know in under an hour and, true to his word, he delivers, even though this veritable polymath is armed with just a piano and an impeccably researched and compiled multi-media presentation. Oh, and an interesting box of props. And five bicycle pumps, each attached to a bike horn and accompanied by a pair of ear defenders. Curious? More on that later.
Turns out that we’ve got an audience full of opera buffs as well, most of whom seem to have an intimate knowledge of the four separate operas that make up this epic. Except me. Call me a Wagner virgin then, even though, like most of the people that inhabit this planet, I know the salient bars of The Rise of the Valkyries.
We start with some tetralogy basics – its genesis, the themes running through it and the key characters, where the simple trick of aligning each of these with an equivalent, recognisable 21st Century celebrity provided laughter and something to hang onto in equal measure. So, the Rhinemaidens become the Kardashians, Trump and Farage also get involved – you get the picture.
Then it’s a canter through the tetralogy, each opera offering Hersch the chance to display well-homed, whimsical humour combined with his penchant for satirising the Germans’ hero worship of all things Wagner, despite the fact that he’s a source of humour for the rest of the thinking world. There’s a nice bit of audience engagement too, a bit of singing (OK, just one note but at least most people sang it in tune) and where he conducted “The Jangling of the Keys”, which sounded just like, well, bunches of keys being jangled by an audience.
These interjections changed things up enough to give the audience a break from Hersch’s energetic, informative and very comical discourse, words rattling out at great pace with only brief pauses to allow appreciation of one great comic aside before the next one lands.
It adds up to quite an exhausting experience – little chance of an afternoon nap whilst Hersch is bouncing around the stage. But seeing this show can save you an awful lot of money, many, many multiples of the ticket cost, in fact enough for a decent family holiday given the prices charged by opera houses the world over, as well as saving you quite a lot of time.
But what about those bike pumps and horns? Well, five gullible men were enticed onto the set, equipped with ear defenders, told to grab those bike pumps, whereupon Hersch (who’s a trained conductor and has his own orchestra – told you he was a polymath) promptly had them reproduce part of a Wagner chorus from the Twilight of the Gods, which is a six hour watch normally but was delivered here in six minutes. Priceless.
Hersch is clearly a very gifted raconteur with an eye for a good punchline and that innate sense of comic timing that wrings every nuance out of what is a nicely conceived script. The accompanying multi-media presentation also deserves a mention, even if it did feature some nightmarish (presumably AI generated/edited) footage involving Trump and Farage. Amazing (and very worrying) what technology can do for you these days.
The verdict? If you’re a Wagner Ring buff (and have even sat through it), then you’ll have an absolute blast. And if, like me you’re not, you’ll also have a blast and get a free holiday out of it. What else do you need as a recommendation?
