Wagner’s culminating masterpiece Parsifal is an enigmatic, troubling work and the Kazakhstan-born, Berlin-based Russian director Evgeny Titov’s provocative new production certainly offers a bleak view of it. For Titov the glories of the music are compromised by the oppressive patriarchal structures of the knightly community. His solution is to undercut the sublimity with a grey stage picture of damp-stained monumental slabs (designed by Etienne Pluss) suggestive of a subterranean chamber with a dark history. In Act 1, the action supposedly moves from the Grail forest to the Grail Hall, but apart from the pillars shifting a few feet and a dim light or two, it’s hard to tell the difference.
The sorcerer Klingsor’s domain in Act 2 has security screens that can also indoctrinate prepubescent next-generation Flowermaidens with images of the fallen Eve and of Christ. When the shaven-headed Flowermaidens themselves emerge in Esther Bialas’s desexualised costumes, they are vampiric daughters of Eve, possibly avenging their sisters through the ages. In a rare moment of light relief they strip Parsifal and playfully spank him. The psychological complexity of Kundry’s faux-maternal seduction of Parsifal is superbly realised: truly pole-axing.
