Think back to when you were 12, and the sensation of re-opening your favourite book. (This is The Spectator; I’m assuming you were all bookish 12-year-olds.) The Silver Chair, perhaps, or The Phoenix and the Carpet — some fantastic alternative world, anyway, filled with characters who felt like old friends. The lumbering iron giants, powered by fire and water. The scary-funny vegetable-monster. The terrifying but magnificent queen, and her eerie batsqueak of sexual-ity. And of course, the bit where pillows turn magically into birds and flit about the room.
This new project from the designer/director team Barbe & Doucet initially feels like being pulled into one of those beloved classics. We’re in a grand hotel circa 1900, and it looks fabulous. Black-and-white illustrations — Gustave Doré meets Peter Firmin — are blown up to colossal size, and conjured into life. Characters emerge from two-dimensional backdrops, fireworks flash, and immersive sound effects make cellars drip with glistening damp. Each scene features some new feat of puppetry or trompe l’oeil. It astonishes, it charms; at every turn, it defies you not to be delighted.
Anyway, somewhere beneath all this, gasping piteously for breath, are the squashed remains of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. It didn’t have to be that way. Die Zauberflöte exists in a self-contained fantasy world, so a hotel, with its hierarchies, rituals and shadowy back-corridors, makes perfect sense. Barbe & Doucet’s Three Boys are bellboys and Sarastro (Brindley Sherratt, sounding chocolatey) is the Escoffier-like head of a guild of chefs. The Queen of the Night (Caroline Wettergreen) is a demanding guest, and Papageno (Björn Bürger) a pillow salesman. It could have worked a treat, with just the lightest of nudges to help the story on its way.
But Barbe & Doucet don’t do light nudges.
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