Centre stage, there’s an industrial-looking black platform, secured by cables. The Three Ladies snap the unconscious Tamino on a mobile phone. The Three Boys look like Gollum in a fright wig. And Papageno, dressed as an ageing vagrant, simulates urination (at least I hope that’s what it was) into an empty wine bottle. Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute could have been designed to raise the collective blood pressure of Against Modern Opera Productions, the Zeffirelli-worshipping Facebook group that’s opera’s equivalent of the Mail on Sunday letters page.
In fact, I sat through Act One with a growing feeling of joy, wonder and admiration for how comprehensively McBurney has solved every problem implicit in staging Mozart’s sublime Enlightenment panto in a barn like the Coliseum. In short, he’s made it into a West End show, with spectacular visual effects (for once, the trials by fire and water actually looked threatening) and an unflagging determination simply to tell the story as clearly and entertainingly as possible.
By way of scenery, video and sound artists contribute playful chalk doodles and atmospheric booms and rumbles — all created in real time. The orchestra spills out of the pit, and the flautist actually takes to the stage for her big solo before being ushered back down with an appreciative pat on the shoulder from Allan Clayton’s Tamino. It’s intensely engaging: McBurney acknowledges the artificiality of the whole set-up while creating an enveloping atmosphere of enchantment and warmth that involves everyone present in the piece’s philosophical and emotional truths.
But if the charm of the first act carries all before it, the central performances pull Act Two into powerful focus. Clayton’s handsome tenor makes for a Tamino with a heroic edge, and as the Queen of the Night (Stephen Jeffreys’s translation restores her title of ‘Star-flaming Queen’) Ambur Braid spits out her high notes with believably human bitterness, even when confined by McBurney to a wheelchair.
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