Wagner's Parsifal has always been a problem to be staged rather than a story to be told. Its symbols — grail, wound, spear, redeemer — resist literalism, and every director who has tried to resolve them into a coherent reading has usually produced something smaller than the music. Evgeny Titov, making his Royal Opera House debut, chooses a different strategy: maximum ambiguity, minimum explanation, and a visual language that keeps the audience uncomfortable enough to keep asking. Etienne Pluss's sets plant both worlds underground. The Grail realm is a bunker of monumental stone blocks that trundle slowly around the stage; Klingsor's kingdom is another bunker, distinguished by a loud suit, a telephone, and serpentine wiring connecting screens to cabinets of trophies — mummy, crown, spear. The continuity of architecture is a thesis: the sacred and the corrupt share the same structural logic, the same institutional smell. CCTV screens and breathing-apparatus knights suggest a bureaucracy of the holy, ritual administered rather than believed. Costume designer Esther Bialas does the most legible symbolic work. Kundry — Wagner's impossible virgin-whore — arrives in black leathers and exits in white, the arc so schematic it feels like Titov showing you the cliché before stripping it of comfort. The flower maidens begin as a disturbing cluster of little girls before their adult counterparts appear as fembots in silver hot pants and headdresses: part Las Vegas chorus line, part Handmaid's Tale. The grotesquerie is the point. Titov isn't condemning the imagery — he's refusing to domesticate it. Some details misfire. The swan Parsifal carries onstage twitches gawkily until the orchestra covers for it; the plastic crunch when he breaks the 'glass' case to retrieve the spear lands with an audible wince in the stalls. These are minor failures in a production whose bigger achievement is the closing coup de théâtre — an eruption of explicit violence that shocks precisely because so much of the preceding three hours has trafficked in the implied. Moments of physical tenderness, distributed sparingly, land harder for the context. Musically, this is exceptional. Jakub Hrůša conducts with a rare combination of structural patience and precipitous urgency — long silences between paragraphs, then sudden forward momentum — and the ROH orchestra responds with textural range that makes the score feel freshly scored: woodwind featherweight and keening, strings oscillating between satin and razor-wire, brass foundry-fresh, the whole occasionally fusing into something described correctly as organ-like tintinnabulation. The cast is uniformly strong with one outstanding performance. Brindley Sherratt's Gurnemanz is granite in the low register with some rough edges at the top, but his storytelling authority is undiminished. Ekaterina Gubanova's Kundry shapeshifts convincingly — shrieks, quasi-speech, sculpted phrases — across impossible demands. Stanislas de Barbeyrac grows through the evening as Parsifal, his earlier fragmentary mode resolving into potent declamation by the final scene. But Christian Gerhaher's Amfortas is the reason to be here. Wild-eyed, self-obsessed, every phrase oozing misery in a way that feels less like acting and more like sustained exposure: you cannot look away and cannot quite bear to watch. The production's refusal to resolve into meaning will frustrate audiences who want Parsifal explained and satisfy those who think explanation is beside the point. Titov's question — do we actually believe the story this opera tells? — goes unanswered, which is the answer. With Gerhaher in the pit of Amfortas's suffering, the question feels urgent enough that the ambiguity doesn't read as evasion. It reads as honesty.
