Evgeny Titov's debut production for the Royal Opera House presents Wagner's final opera as a brutal and powerful staging that explains as little as possible. The production, which runs until 17 October, features Christian Gerhaher as a compelling and wild-eyed Amfortas, with Jakub Hrůša conducting the Royal Opera's orchestra in a superb performance.
An elusive staging of Wagner's mystical masterpiece
Some of the narrative trappings of Wagner's final opera – the grail, the wound, the spear – are immediately recognisable as symbolic. Others, such as woman, saviour, chastity, seduction, suffering and death, are harder to pin down, lodged in the half-light between the literal and the metaphorical. Wagner's score is his most beguilingly luminous; its critics have pored over the work's commitment to racial purity, its misogyny, its religiosity. The question Titov's staging poses is whether we really believe in the story Parsifal tells – the fall, the curse, the redemption through purity – and what it means if we want to.
In Etienne Pluss's sets, the grail realm is an underground bunker hewn from monumental stone blocks that trundle slowly around the stage. There are CCTV screens and a grimy washroom where Amfortas, the fallen King, is scrubbed down by Grail Knights in breathing apparatus. Costume designer Esther Bialas has the Knights in anoraks. Kundry wears black leathers at first, virginal white later. In a rare moment of literal-mindedness, Titov has Parsifal arrive holding the swan he has shot, which twitches gawkily until the orchestra heralds its demise.
Klingsor's kingdom and the flower maidens
Evil Klingsor's kingdom is another bunker – no enchanted garden here, just a loud suit, a telephone for barking orders, more screens with wiring that curls serpentlike across the floor and cabinets displaying his treasures: an Egyptian mummy, a crown, the sacred spear. In another of the production's less convincing details, Parsifal breaks the “glass” to retrieve the spear with an unsatisfying plastic crunch. The flower maidens first appear as a disturbing gaggle of little girls chasing around Klingsor's lair. Their grown-up counterparts are fembots in headdresses and silver hot pants, part chorus line, part Handmaid's Tale. The effect is grotesque – but how could it be otherwise in 2026?
Some of the stage pictures and much of the subtle lighting designs riff on the language of religious painting. Other details raise questions rather than answering them: the leather restraining straps used on Amfortas during the grail ritual, the metal gynaecological chair in which Kundry cowers. Moments of physical tenderness stand out, shocking amid so much implied and – in Titov's remarkable closing coup de théâtre – explicit violence.
Superb musical performance
This production's power also depends on the musical performance, which threaded beauty and emotional intensity through so much equivocation. Conductor Jakub Hrůša charted long lines through Wagner's enormous score, taking time between some musical paragraphs and pushing precipitously onwards elsewhere. The orchestra was on superb form – woodwind featherweight or saccharine or keening painfully, the strings producing sound alternately in reams of satin and razor-sharp shards, the brass foundry-fresh – at times blending into a single, majestically organ-like tintinnabulation.
Brindley Sherratt was a moody, complicated Gurnemanz – some nasty high notes standing out against his granite lower register – but his storytelling was as compelling as ever. Ekaterina Gubanova was a constantly shapeshifting Kundry, her tone reactive, from shrieks to quasi-speech, via finely sculpted phrases that seemed to skim the orchestra's surface. Mark Stone's Klingsor managed to be both oleaginous and fierce, James Platt's Titurel appropriately stentorian. Stanislas de Barbeyrac wielded his gleaming steel of a voice on the title role, his earlier fragmentary mode blossoming into potent, supple declamation in the final scene. But it is Christian Gerhaher's appalling, wild-eyed Amfortas that makes this production a must-see. In this bleak portrayal of self-obsession, every note he sang oozed misery, every phrase felt unmissable.
