By Shirley Apthorp [Financial Times, 8 February 2011]

Despite Japanese bondage, contortion, army camouflage, a long view up a supernumerary’s vagina, and a large albino python, Romeo Castellucci’s new Parsifal for Brussels’ La Monnaie is not particularly shocking. This is the radical Italian theatre director’s first venture into the world of large-scale opera, and he approaches it with his characteristically anti-dramatic abstraction.