Review: PARSIFAL, Royal Ballet And Opera
Evgeniy Titov's new prouction was met with cheers and boos
Corruption, redemption, lies. Parsifal is ripe with symbols and dogmas for a director to toy with and tear down. So why is Evgeniy Titov's iconoclastic staging so predictably iconoclastic? Is it because undermining the rigid morality of a Wagner opera feels like the go-to option in the age of cynicism?
In Parsifal the eponymous hero unwittingly finds himself in the kingdom of the Grail Knights. Their leader Amfortas, kept alive by the power of the Grail, is suffering from a wound that will not heal after a sorcerer, Klingsor, stole the holy spear that pieced Jesus on the cross. But forget chain mail and romance. Designer Étienne Pluss's world has the claustrophobic embrace of a Berlin nightclub: slabs of looming concrete, crepuscular light dripping from above, and leather. A lot of leather. Security cameras and screens suggest something more dystopian. Or perhaps it is apocalyptic? Amfortas's bath in Act I becomes a chemical rubdown, as if he were returning from an irradiated wasteland.
Titov's directorial flair is visually arresting, yes, but rarely do the images cut through the monochrome gloom to cohere into something tangible. Kundry's first confrontation with Parsifal sees her breastfeeding him. Klingsor is envisaged as a mafia boss, his lair a wall of screens which glows with a slideshow of Christian imagery. The flowermaidens are clad in shimmering metallic jumpsuits, somewhere between Berghain and The Forbidden Planet. Specks of Amfortas’s blood are the only dashes of colour in Act 1, from which the chorus, his cult like acolytes, drink from.
The vocals are the production's redemption. Brindley Sherratt's full-bodied Gurnemanz, robed in a leather trench coat, cuts through the grey gloom, as do Stanislas de Barbeyrac's puckish wide-eyed Parsifal and Ekaterina Gubanova's eloquent Kundry, filling every crevice of Covent Garden. Christian Gerhaher hobbles around in a loincloth as Amfortas, his voice gorgeously sonorous.
Wagner's opera asks whether purity can survive in a corrupted world. Titov's answer is to corrupt the world further and hope the shock passes for insight. The thing is, most Wagner productions that trundle through Covent Garden have a post-modern morality inversion where the Wagnerian hero is heavily hinted to not be all that they seem. So seeing it again just doesn't quite hit home. If you don’t believe my scepticism, ask the audience. Discernible boos emanated from audience to greet the creative team as they emerged for their curtain call.
Parsifal plays at the Royal Ballet And Opera until 17 October
Photo Credits: Marc Brenner
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