"She does not feel self-conscious when she is on stage. It is only when she returns to the wings that she feels a little shy."

I'm reading "Why I’m performing Wagner naked at the Royal Opera aged 81/Illona Linthwaite won’t let being nude in front of 2,200 people stop her from defying the ‘bad press’ given to older women" (London Times).

“The curtain goes up and there’s nothing happening, it’s just me. I thought that was really frightening and then when it happened, I thought, actually, this is brilliant,” she said.

The role is Erda, in "Siegfried."

Erda is usually “frocked her up to the nines” in gossamer gowns, Linthwaite said, but Barrie Kosky, the director, wanted the octogenarian’s body to symbolise nature and remind the audience of their mortality.... 

That's the director's view — an old woman reminds you of death — not the old woman's. She thinks she's there to remind you of life: 

She thinks her performance is something of a political act in a country she views as “spiritually arid” for its lack of empathy towards older people. Ultimately, she wants the audience to look at her and see the future not as a tragedy, but an adventure. She wants people to feel: “Hey, I’m looking forward to 80.”

I asked Grok: "If you saw Erda in 'Siegfried' portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?" [ADDED: The actual full question was "What views are attributed to the character Erda in 'Siegfried' and if you saw her portrayed by an old woman would she remind you of death or life?"

Answer:

"If portrayed by an old woman... she would more strongly remind me of life than of death. She is the eternal, generative Earth itself — rising from the depths when disaster looms, birthing gods and heroes, embodying continuity and the source from which all emerges and returns. Her sleep is a womb-like rest, not oblivion; her wisdom is nurturing and foundational, linked to creation and renewal (even as she acknowledges endings). While she speaks of inevitable decline and the gods' twilight, this is framed within a larger cycle of transformation, where downfall makes way for new beginnings (Siegfried and Brünnhilde's love as redemption). An aged portrayal evokes a wise crone or grandmotherly archetype — timeless vitality beneath wrinkles, the enduring life-force of nature rather than a skeletal reaper. Death appears in her pronouncements as part of life's rhythm, not her essence. She is the ground of being, not its termination."

My follow-up: "Would you say anything different if the old woman — 81 years old — played the role naked?"

By chance, as I'm writing this, Meade is playing the Elton John recording, "Candle in the Wind," with the line "All the papers had to say/Was that Marilyn was found in the nude."

Here's Grok's answer: "Yes, the nudity — especially at 81, as in Barrie Kosky's recent Royal Opera House Ring cycle (starting with Das Rheingoldin 2023 and continuing through Die Walküre in 2025, where an elderly actress like Illona Linthwaite or Rose Knox-Peebles portrayed a silent, omnipresent Erda naked throughout much of the staging) — would shift my impression noticeably toward something more complex and intensified, but still ultimately leaning toward life rather than death, though with a stronger edge of vulnerability, decay, and raw exposure. In Kosky's concept, this naked elderly Erda isn't a one-off appearance in Siegfried but a presiding, mostly mute witness to the entire cycle's environmental and existential despoilment: Mother Earth stripped bare, exploited, aged, and desiccated by human/godly hubris. The nudity underscores fragility and truth — no costumes, no veils, no mythic gloss — making her body itself a map of time's passage, sagging flesh, wrinkles, and stooped posture evoking the literal ravages of the planet. Critics described her as 'wizened,' 'shuffling,' 'desiccated,' sometimes evoking a dementia-like bewilderment or Dürer's witch-like archetype, which can summon deathly associations: the crone as harbinger, the body in decline, entropy made visible. Yet even there, the core resonance remains generative and vital rather than terminal. She's not a corpse or reaper; she's the enduring, naked source — the ground from which everything springs, now laid open and wounded but still present, still watching, still capable (in the staging) of tender gestures like offering comfort or bearing flowers. The nakedness strips away artifice to reveal unvarnished existence: life's persistence through decay, the stubborn reality of the body as the vessel of wisdom and continuity. An 81-year-old woman baring all defies cultural erasure of older female bodies, insisting on visibility and dignity in vulnerability — a profoundly life-affirming act amid the cycle's themes of ending and renewal. In a Siegfried-specific context (her brief, sung awakening scene), if staged this way — naked, ancient, rising from the earth — it would heighten the primordial eroticism and maternal power Wagner implies (she's Wotan's lover, mother of Brünnhilde), but through inversion: not youthful allure, but the raw, unidealized flesh of the eternal feminine. It might evoke a shiver of mortality (the body as mortal shell), yet the overwhelming impression would be of life's unapologetic continuity — scarred, exposed, but unbroken — rather than death's victory. The nudity makes her warnings of doom more poignant because she's the living proof that endings feed new beginnings; the earth endures naked, even in twilight. So yes, I'd say more: the naked 81-year-old Erda would feel less like a serene, shrouded archetype of life-force and more like a stark, unflinching testament to life's endurance through humiliation and time's wear — still emphatically life, but life stripped to its bruised, breathing, insistent core."