The question of what you actually need to put on an opera is a vexed one right now. The current management at both English and Welsh National Operas believe it can be done without a full-time chorus or orchestra; writing in the Guardian in 2022, the head of Arts Council England (ACE) suggested that car parks and pubs would prove just as serviceable as established theatres. The suggestion that the industry step away from ‘grand opera’ rested on the idea that the artform is indelibly associated with expensive, extravagant spectacle – casts of thousands, splendid sets designed to elicit applause, and so on.

While recent reports suggest that ACE may not be wholly clued-up on the state of opera in the UK, there certainly is a tradition in opera of stages stuffed with crinolines and photo-perfect naturalist designs. Such productions tend to be long-lived warhorses and box office staples: Richard Eyre’s La traviata has been plugging away at Covent Garden for 30 years; John Copley’s La bohème, whose Parisian streets and garrett were a riot of period details, was retired in 2015 after over 40 years of commercial service. This style of production has its roots in opera’s past, when the job of the director, as Jonathan Miller once quipped of the New York Met, was mostly to show the singers to the stage. When they got there, they stood and delivered – often to astounding expressive effect, but not in ways consonant with modern theatrical stagecraft or contemporary directing.

In The Empty Space, the theatre director Peter Brook proposed that all that is needed for an act of theatre is for an actor to walk across an empty stage. Ted Huffman’s austere new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin for the Royal Opera starts just like this, with its protagonist disappearing upstage to lie in wait in Tatyana’s imagination. Huffman’s stripped-back staging – his mainstage debut – is an artistic choice rather than a commercial imposition, but it does prompt questions about the kind of artform we imagine opera to be, and what audiences think they’re paying for; on the opening night there were a few boos launched at the production team – a relatively rare occurrence at Covent Garden.

There is hardly any set – just the bare black walls of the stage, with a row of chairs at the back. Most of the action takes place downstage, requiring only a couple of chairs. The two big parties use a few brightly coloured balloons and a handful of dancers; there is a tumble of snowfall before Lensky’s fateful duel with Onegin. The titles of the scenes are projected onto the backdrop, as if title cards from a film. It is a dreamlike series of recollections, with Huffman focusing on psychology rather than other thematic strands associated with the piece, such as the tension of country and city, or class.

This clears a path for Huffman’s meticulous direction, with mannerism and gesture beautifully crafted throughout. The effect, for the most part, is of disciplined intensity. The setting is contemporary and anonymous, with finely judged costuming. Onegin wears his severe coat like armour; Tatyana goes to meet him outside still wearing her pyjamas, underneath the coat, and with a pair of borrowed kitten heels from her more worldly sister Olga. She’s not dressed for the actual or emotional weather, vulnerable in her nightwear and playing at womanhood in a pair of shoes not her own. Olga’s playful attempts to help – she helps her sister in the letter scene when Tatyana pours out her feelings to Onegin – are going to end in disaster. Tatyana’s mortification in the ensuing meeting is truly excruciating.

There’s a prevailing logic underlying Huffman’s minimalist approach. Tchaikovsky intended the opera to be premiered not at the Bolshoi but rather by students from the Moscow Conservatory. What he craved was authenticity and immediacy, rather than the puffed-up, lavish style of the big-budget opera stages. Rather than calling it an opera, he instead gave it the more understated subtitle of ‘lyrical scenes’. His choice of subject itself – an unhappy provincial love affair, rekindled, then thwarted, and a friendship gone disastrously awry – is a domestic and psychological one; there is a strong tonal and emotional contrast to sweeping epics of national history that were the mainstay of the newly-created Russian opera repertoire from composers such as Glinka and Mussorgsky.

The theatrical purity of this vision comes over well in Huffman’s production, which begins and ends with Onegin offering a ritualistic, curt bow to the public; Lensky gives one, too, after his suicide, which perhaps implies the piece is some terrible haunted ceremony. The whole is framed by the illuminated proscenium, which enchants the empty space. Compelling use is made of the stage’s sheer scale, which dwarfs the characters and envelopes them in darkness, suggesting both existential isolation and vulnerability. Onegin’s aimless wandering in the years that pass after the duel feels like a synecdoche for the whole production style, in the best possible sense – it is as if Onegin is in a kind of purgatory of eternal remembrance, heightened by the swirl of mist upstage.

The efficiency and economy of Tchaikovsky’s expressive language also rings true with Huffman’s staging. Anyone who has come out of Nutcracker or Swan Lake humming the tunes hardly needs his gifts as a melodist explained. But it is their emotional concision and compression that is so remarkable. Just hear the two falling gestures that define the finale of his last symphony: one, in B minor, is a wounded sigh, and the other a nostalgic remembrance, which is half-smiling and half-crying.

Onegin’s key melodies fall, too; in doing so they capture the sad emotional entropy of the opera, as time passes, pathways to happiness close off, and regrets accumulate. The work opens with a four-note tendril that sinks with each repetition. Lensky’s aria before the duel, in which he sings sadly of his lost youth and his terror in the face of death, begins above the stave and descends, rounded out with another sighing fall. Tenor Liparet Avetisyan, playing the role at Covent Garden, delivered its reprise with wintry fragility.

The climactic, central melody of Tatyana’s letter scene also intimates the falling off to come.  Starting on an exaltant top note, its descent is an outpouring of passion that slightly curdles in the twist Tchaikovsky adds to its second half, in a disorienting whole-tone step where one would expect it to proceed diatonically. It is beautiful but also somehow ungainly, a reflection of the mismatch between Tatyana’s erotic imagination and the man Onegin really is.

Onegin ends the opera with a truly spectacular melodic fall, devastated after Tatyana refuses to elope with him and ruin the life she’s built for herself. Two searching outbursts begin a rise to a magnificent top G – one of the great moments for baritone in the repertoire – which is held for as long as the singer can hack it before falling on its knees to the E below, launching a downward plunge from the brass. Prince Gremin’s aria, in which he sings adoringly of Tatyana and the rejuvenating quality of his love for her, is the only one to strive happily upward.

Tchaikovsky played fast and loose in his adaptation of Pushkin, and Huffman borrows this same creative licence for several interventions of his own. Lensky’s anger at Olga’s flirtation with Onegin are confirmed when we see them engaged in an animated tryst before the name-day party. Intuiting, perhaps, that she is never truly going to be his, he shoots himself during the duel, having drunkenly destroyed his friendship the night before. Even though Onegin lays down his weapon, the damage has been done, and Lensky’s spiral to self-destruction seems inexorable.

It’s a departure from the norm, where Onegin reluctantly shoots Lensky, and on the surface might appear to absolve him. Olga and Tatyana appear in Huffman’s production at the duel to try and call it off. Olga’s presence along with Onegin, whose pride and social stiffness do not allow him to back down, make it clear that their reckless affair plays no small part in driving Lensky over the edge; Onegin doesn’t pull the trigger, but he might as well have done. Onegin is haunted by the rather sinister Monsieur Triquet – done up like a clown for the name-day party – and, presumably, the gnawing question of whether there really was anything he could’ve done differently to save Lensky. Disappointingly, Onegin and Olga’s relationship feels like a dropped thread; when she appears in the conclusive scene, we get little sense of the feelings of guilt and shame that must haunt that pair, alongside Onegin’s remorse about Tatyana.

When there is nowhere to hide much hinges on singing of the highest quality, which was more variable than Huffman’s immaculate direction. Kristina Mkhitaryan as Tatyana made a fabulous impression, delicate and fresh in the letter scene, and revealing raw power in her furious, bitter confrontation with Onegin at the end. Gordon Bintner has an easygoing, unctuous sound that is especially effective in his dismissal of Tatyana’s feelings, both condescending and thoughtlessly offhand. Later, he was somewhat drowned out by energised if over-enthusiastic playing from the pit, and the top notes in the final scene, lacked definition. Dmitry Belosselskiy’s Gremin also had trouble with top notes, and tenor Christophe Mortagne made for an uneven Triquet. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating essay on how to do more with less.