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.
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