Opera finale depicts a suicide blast

A female suicide bomber appears on a London stage and blows herself up along with the cast.

The finale to the English National Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods” is just the latest in a series of shock tactics by the company that brought pole dancing, gang rape and multiple stabbings to the sometimes staid world of opera.

But the scene failed to impress critics long used to the company’s radical productions.

“Utterly crass” is how a critic from the Guardian described the scene in which Wagner’s heroine Bruennhilde straps explosives to her body and sacrifices herself. “It’s an intellectually lazy way to end, and the cheapest of tricks.”

Director Phyllida Lloyd, who directed the hit musical “Mamma Mia!” before turning her hand to Wagner, was unrepentant about her staging of the opera.

In traditional stagings, Bruennhilde rides a horse into the burning funeral pyre erected for her dead lover Siegfried. But Lloyd said she wanted to make the finale of Wagner’s mammoth four-opera Ring cycle more realistic.