The Flying Shadow at The Cockpit

Music: Robert Fokkens
Book: Mehdi Razi & Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh
Libretto: Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh

“All the hearts of the people are my identity, So take away my passport!” Mahmoud Darwish

The Flying Shadow is a reclamation. A weaving of myth, memory, and biography. Stories told by voices too often erased.

Before Richard Wagner was a revolutionary composer and opera maker, he was a displaced young artist fleeing debt and censorship. He was forced with his pregnant wife Minna onto a storm-lashed cargo ship, bribing his way across the Baltic Sea. That journey, often overlooked, was the seed for The Flying Dutchman ground-breaking opera.

The Flying Shadow returns to that crossing, not to romanticise it, but to honour it and other displacement journeys of liberation. In this new opera, stories of migration, exile, and survival are illustrated; whether from a plastic boats crossing the English Channel, an abandoned fishing vessel now crossing Indian Ocean, or a cargo ship taking Richard Wagner to storms in the North sea.

Co-written by Iranian artists Mehdi Razi and Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh who is also the librettist, composed by Robert Fokkens, and set design by Alice Vanini, the piece draws on lived experience of displacement. It connects 19th-century escape with present-day refugee sea routes, asking what’s carried, what’s lost, and what gets left behind. The Flying Shadow is the beginning of a larger journey toward a new opera, rooted in the dignity of lived truth.