It’s sometimes said that if Wagner were alive today he’d be making movies, but come on – really? A generation of Wagnerites has grown up for whom the first and definitive encounter with Der Ring des Nibelungen was on the small screen – in my case, the BBC’s early-eighties serialisation of the Bayreuth centenary production. What lingered was not the spectacle, but the intimacy: Donald McIntyre and Gwyneth Jones enveloped in darkness, reaching into each other’s souls. If you grew up with Wagner on TV and came of age, culturally speaking, around the time The Sopranos first aired, it seems obvious that the Ring isn’t some effects-laden Marvel blockbuster before its time, but the world’s first long-form TV drama.

For evidence, look at the proliferation of small-scale Rings since 1990, when Jonathan Dove first produced his pioneering (if heavily cut) Birmingham version for just 18 players. Ben Woodward, the conductor of Regents Opera’s ongoing Ring at the Freemasons’ Hall has opted for an orchestra of 24, using the Hall’s organ to beef up the climaxes and thicken the darker textures. He’s taken care to obscure the attack of its main entries, so you only rarely perceive the characteristic organ tone and, in fact, barely notice its presence until you feel the air quivering and wonder how such a small ensemble can be making such an expansive sound.

The Ring isn’t a Marvel blockbuster but the world’s first long-form TV drama

This Siegfried was my first encounter with the Regents Opera cycle. Caroline Staunton’s production is (unfortunately but probably unavoidably) performed in the round, though surtitles are provided and she makes imaginative use of the hall’s various exits and entrances. The sets, designed by Isabella van Braeckel, are minimal and portable, with a Tate Modern vibe: a lightbox for Fafner’s cave, video screens for the forest and a Marcel Duchamp sculpture as Siegfried’s anvil, though the sight-lines in the venue made it difficult to see anything below waist height.

Against those caveats you’ve got Woodward’s masterly pacing, the passion of the orchestral playing and a distinctly urban production concept which is no sillier than anything you’d see in a major house these days. Staunton’s central concern is to make the adolescent Siegfried psychologically convincing and, as played by Peter Furlong, he’s an impulsive, damaged kid in (nice touch) a Slayer T-shirt, living in Steptoe-like squalor with Holden Madagame’s nasal, capering Mime and possibly hallucinating the whole dragon-slaying episode. That’s a pity, because Craig Lemont Walters – a campy, pimped-up Fafner with a startlingly sepulchral voice – was a scene-stealer. Corinne Hart’s Woodbird seemed real enough – a smiley stewardess with a voice of sunshine, who bubbled with glee when Siegfried agreed to rescue Brünnhilde.

That’s the general picture, anyway. The appearances of Alberich (Oliver Gibbs) and Erda (Mae Heydorn) were imposingly staged and sung, and Ralf Lukas sang with shining dignity as the Wanderer – taking the role over from the late and much-missed Keel Watson. And so we came to the final scene, with Siegfried and Brünnhilde (Catharine Woodward) alone on the mountaintop, only partly obscured from view by van Braeckel’s white drapes. Woodward sounded radiant and Furlong sustained his vocal ardour – unvarnished, for sure, but never coarse – right to the last: two young people falling in love awkwardly, hopefully and (believe it or not) realistically. The Regents Opera Ring will be staged in its entirety at the end of the year, and on this showing it’d be worth four nights of anyone’s time.

Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in Denmark in 2000 and is currently on its third run (and second production) at the English National Opera. It probably helps that it’s based on an A-level set text that has subsequently been adapted as a major TV series. I’m not familiar with either, so I can’t say how faithful it is as an adaptation, but Ruders’s score is atmospheric and moves with purpose – rare in contemporary opera. Under Joana Carneiro the ENO orchestra played it with needlepoint intensity.

But boy, that means a lot of musical oppression to endure. There’s precious little light in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, and – as sometimes happens with science fiction – most of the imaginative energy seems to have gone into world-building. The mechanics of the misogynist state of Gilead are powerfully depicted by Ruders and his librettist Paul Bentley, and the director Annilese Miskimmon realises them with economy and style. But with the story told from the perspective of a single character, Offred (Kate Lindsey – wholly compelling), there isn’t much by way of motivation (or indeed plot) left for the rest of the cast, though Rachel Nicholls delivered some blinding coloratura as a sadistic prison guard. Juliet Stevenson spoke the prologue and epilogue as eloquently as you’d expect, though an opera that ends with the spoken word is always going to fall slightly flat.