* Update Sunday 7 August 2022: today is your last chance to see performances of  either/both grand operas. Julia Burbach’s shortened productions will give you outstanding singing, immaculate  playing by the Orpheus Sinfonia and Wagner’s epic-sounding music (pity about his complicated and crazy plots). It is a rare opportunity: just this once, forsake the sunshine for several hours in a superbly restored classic of the theatre world

TWO OF HACKNEY’S MOST powerful cultural forces have come together for the highlight show of an annual festival that observers once thought was far too ambitious for one of London’s poorer boroughs.

Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, home to drama so imaginative it won a worldwide reputation, and the Hackney Empire, which long ago found a way to get ethnic minority audiences into theatre seats, are combining for a Grimeborn double bill of Richard Wagner operas from the Ring Cycle.

Started 15 years ago with Arcola fingers crossed, the alt-opera Grimeborn quickly became good box-office. The evocatively named series — think Noughties grime music, think Glyndebourne opera — was devised by Arcola co-founder Mehmet Ergen after an idea that emerged from a Battersea Arts Centre opera festival.

The Arcola theatre company was named after the Dalston E8 street in which it first set up — in an abandoned sweatshop. The theatre later migrated to more central, and practical, premises near Dalston junction.

The Empire story goes back to the mid-’80s when impresarios Claire and Roland Muldoon decided to save a grand theatre in Mare Street that was cruelly made to hide its ornate, Victorian-baroque interior fittings under false ceilings and bland decoration as it operated as a bingo hall.

The productions of this Grimeborn are likely to be as creative as previous seasons’ presentations, one of which somehow persuaded audiences — well, almost — that they were under water and watching sirens writhe in the legendary Rhine.

Never were Wagner’s epic fairytales such fun. They were superbly sung and acted, too, and well accompanied by a small band.

The festival’s HMS Pinafore will give the Gilbert and Sullivan musical a fashionably anti-imperialist tone; The Boatswain’s Mate by Ethel Smyth is re-set not in the late dame’s era but in the 1950s; Sumida River in Sign Language, will up the diversity stakes and the jazzy, poppy Sin The Musical, by John-Michael Mahoney, is a world premiere.

None of those appeal? Check the site because there are nine other productions.

Wagner’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung will sensibly be staged at the spacious (the auditorium, not the seats) Empire in what is being termed “innovative reduction”.

Both operas will be sung in German (tilt your eyes up for the English surtitles).

Neither opera is more than two hours (no intervals). At last, the Ring Cycle cut to posterior-friendly length.

David Altheer 230722

* Grimeborn, Tues 26 July 2022-Sat 10 September 2022. Arcola Theatre, below, 24 Ashwin Street, Dalston E8 3DL; Hackney Empire, 291 Mare Street E8 1EJ

* Backstory: Arcola, 20 cutting-edge years; Million-pound Arcola move; Turkish lesson for Hackney; A Dalston music fest; Hackney group makes theatre work for youngsters

* Siegfried rehearsal pic © Alex Brenner. Others © [email protected], and for sale for reproduction.

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