Dream ticket

Spoiler alert: it’s all a dream. At least, I think that’s what we’re meant to take away from the business with which director James Brining accompanies the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A little girl in ochre pyjamas is trying to sleep while in an adjacent room braying, guffawing adults sit down to a formal dinner. Servants bustle about, and there’s a suggestion that all is not well in the hosts’ marriage. Then sleep descends with a David Lynch-like fizzle of electric lights and we’re pitched into a world of princes, serpents and enchantment.

Opera directors love unloading on overtures: obscuring the composer’s own musical pathway into their world with elaborately mimed footnotes to a text you haven’t yet read. It’s Brining’s only major miscalculation, and one that might perhaps be remedied by taking a billhook to about 75 per cent of that quaffing and faffing. Bank the idea of a divided family in a convention-bound society, remember that little girl, and then enjoy an imaginative, compassionate and slightly spooky ride through Mozart and Schikaneder’s Enlightenment fairy tale.