Boris Godunov RBO 2026 ©Mihaela Bodlovic
If anyone in London still wondered whether Boris Godunov could carry box-office heft alongside “flashier” repertory drama, the packed house and palpable buzz tonight provided its own answer. This is not merely Mussorgsky’s dark meditation on guilt and power; under Richard Jones’s ten-year-old staging (freshly revived yet feeling eerily immediate), it’s opera’s answer to a psychological thriller — where every chord, every shadowed corner of stingy light, conspires to corner the mind and heart.
From the moment the curtain lifts without pause through all seven tableaux of the original 1869 score, you sense that this is no ritualistic relic. Instead, it feels like theatre of the damned — a world on the edge, where paranoia isn’t a dramatic device but an atmospheric texture that clings to every note. Conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, the Orchestra of the Royal Ballet and Opera inhabits Mussorgsky’s score with a visceral intensity that never quite lets you rest. Subtle woodwind whispers turn to shrill heralds of doom; brass and percussion loom like approaching storms.
At the centre of this psychodrama stands Sir Bryn Terfel’s Boris — not as a monarchically distanced figure of historical “greatness”, but as a man in freefall, every rung of his dignity slipping into madness. Terfel’s approach is no mere vocal showcase; it’s a study in interior collapse. He inhabits the role with a compelling blend of vocal heft and intimate vulnerability, making Boris’s moral torment not only tangible, but inescapably human — a tragic conspiracy between guilt and fate.
Jones’s direction plays this gripping inner collapse across a stark, often unsettling visual palette. The absence of interval serves the drama well: we are not permitted to leave the Tsar’s unravelling for consolation. Instead, we watch in real time as public disintegration bleeds into private madness, all the while underscored by the production’s signature motif — the spinning child’s top, a grotesque talisman of innocence corrupted.
The supporting cast offers sturdy pillars to Terfel’s tortured tower: Adam Palka’s Pimen carries a weight of spiritual stoicism, while Andrii Kymach’s Shchelkalov and John Daszak’s Prince Shuisky sharpen the courtly edges of instability. Jamez McCorkle’s Grigory brings a restless energy, and the Royal Opera Chorus, unpredictable and elemental, nearly takes the roof off in moments of communal outcry.
Musically and dramatically, the evening thrives on its unflinching commitment to Mussorgsky’s original conception — unadorned, uncompromising, and starkly intimate. This is opera that doesn’t simply portray psychological terror, but makes you feel it. As Boris’s world collapses and the final curtain descends, one is left not with the opulence of imperial spectacle, but with the unsettling truth that the deepest theatre is not the grandest: it’s the most honest.
A riveting, psychologically probing Godunov that speaks with contemporary urgency — both a triumph for the performers and a chilling reminder of the costs of power.
David Buchler, Opera Spy
