West Malvern Ring

It started, as often things do, one evening in The Brewers Arms. That night, Rob Rankin, Judith Sanoom and myself, Tim White, were reflecting on the cultural life of the village, when Rob mentioned he had long wanted to stage an opera at the West Malvern Social Club. Rob could do that - drop something simultaneously ridiculous, revelatory and remarkable into the conversation and leave you perplexed as to how to process his suggestion. Judith and I recoiled and regrouped, and the notion became a recurrent topic between the three of us, until Rob's all too sudden death in 2024. At which point this flight of fancy might well have evaporated into a wisp of memory. Instead, it became an idee fixe, a preoccupation of mind believed to be firmly resistant to any attempt to modify it. More alarming still, it metamorphosed from a manageable realization of a pocket opera well-suited to the modest proportions of the Social Club stage to an undertaking on an epic scale, a pulsating black hole, drawing every last drop of creative energy into its centre. Those three characteristics. ridiculous, revelatory, remarkable, circled around the project - we hadn't willed them into being, they permeated the air of a village that would dare to own its own pub. A village of such creative vitality that rather having achieved a sense of community was only paused at the foothills of the heights it might attain. The ride has just begun.

Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle is the collection of four operas that exemplified his concept of the total artwork, based on German and Norse legend. The 15 hour composition

tells of gods and giants, heroes and goddesses, dragons and mortals conjoined in what has been considered a critique of industrialized society. Its universal themes play out through encounters laced with murder, lust, betrayal, and incest - almost as if he had vacationed in West Malvern - culminating in Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods. We plan to produce a three-hour adaptation of the work, straining every creative sinew of this wonderful village to present an evening by turns audacious and outrageous, funny and poignant, leaving in its wake a legacy of collaboration, creative endeavour and community that we hope will inspire others to dare to dream.

You can follow the ongoing development of the project at our website, on Facebook and stock up on merch , and, if you live in or around West Malvern then please do join us in whatever capacity you wish. All profits from the ticket sales will be donated to Malvern Hills Community Foundation .