She had seen an old etching of the first Bayreuth production of Rheingold in the 19th century, where stagehands pushed the Rhinemaidens around mounted on poles on trucks, to look like swimming mermaids.

It reminded her of an outdoor performance she worked on years ago with Melbourne-based theatre company Strange Fruit, whose trademark five-metre-high “sway poles” had a more recent outing in Kate Miller-Heidke’s Eurovision performance.

Problem solved.

But it was far from the last problem Chaundy had to grapple with. Playing Wagner’s gender roles for a modern audience, for example. This Teutonic fantasy can get pretty blokey.

“There is a question of male entitlement,” Chaundy says: the dwarf Alberich “thinks he can wander into the swamp and have his way with these women”.

“There’s the question of how to interpret the Rhinemaidens. I don’t want the audience to see it as their fault that they flirted with Alberich and rejected him so he turned into this dreadful creature.”

Also, the goddess Fricka “can often be depicted as a nagging harridan who gets on Wotan’s wick … in fact Wotan is an entitled man who thinks he can get away with doing anything he likes. I can certainly see her point of view.”

But don’t’ mistake Chaundy’s problem solving for an attempt to skew the text.

“Is that a feminist reading?” she asks. “I don’t know. I’m always interested in female characters – and it does become a very interesting opera for women. He did write great female characters, and was interested in exploring the relationship between men and women in quite a deep way. It’s a great thing to work with.“

Her general approach to the text, she says, is to “concentrate on the story, not on the man”. The white supremacist resonances of the mythic imagery, the anti-Semitic suggestions in the depiction of the Nibelung race … There is only so much she can do.

“I have to just push it out of my mind and tell the story,” Chaundy says. “And not to get into conflict with Wagner – because that’s another production.

“That’s why the work still speaks to us. Everyone feels it resonates with so many things in contemporary life.”

The Ring cycle remains popular not just for its music, she says, but because its mythical story somehow feels so relevant.

“We have massive climate change and world leaders who behave like men-children,” Chaundy says. “You can feel a lot of parallels with what’s going on – with the twilight of the gods.”

Over the next three years she will direct all four Ring operas, culminating with a full cycle in 2023. She wants them to move through time, to start in the distant past where gods walked the earth, and bring us to a Gotterdammerung in the present day.

“We’ve been hanging back because of the pandemic, going ‘are we going to be able to go ahead’. And suddenly we’re able to start work on everything. It was like a tsunami – from treading water to full-on, here we go, no stopping.”

Das Rheingold plays February 3, 5 and 7 at the Regent Theatre.