UK Edition
Review
The Magic Flute, Opera North review: a good-looking production which lacks the necessary magic
One doesn’t envy any director confronted with the unique challenges of mounting The Magic Flute. It isn’t only that striking a balance between the elements of innocent pantomime and abstruse Freemasonry is so tricky; there’s also the intractable problem of its ramshackle construction and incoherent narrative of a quest for love and enlightenment, full of knots or dead ends, and saddled with a nominal good guy in Sarastro who seems just as unpleasant as the villainous Queen of the Night.
For Opera North’s new staging, James Brining, Artistic Director of Leeds Playhouse, has added an introductory dumb show during the overture. From my partial view of the stage, what I could discern was a little girl settling into bed, while next door her upper-crust parents separate after a screaming row during a dinner party. Left in her father’s care, she falls asleep and what follows is her anxious dream, in which the eponymous flute is a luminous wand and much of the imagery seems to have been inspired by the Gothick world of the Harry Potter movies.
Brining gradually loses interest in the figure of the little girl and focuses instead on presenting Sarastro as the President of a very fishy Opus Dei sort of a cult, in which the women are nuns and the men dog-collared curates, policed by a black-shirt militia and attended by docile children in old-fashioned scouting uniforms. Time’s up, I am glad to say, on Sarastro’s patriarchal expressions of female inferiority, but one is left in more than usual doubt as to whether he is to regarded overall as benign or malign.
Robert Howarth conducts a robust and muscular account of the score, lacking in some of the Mozartian grace notes. The same might be said of the Chinese-Australian tenor Kang Wang, whose Tamino is too stylistically hefty for the ‘Portrait’ aria and who seemed uncomfortable with the dialogue. The prize-winning South African soprano Vuvu Mpofu is also a rather poised and mature Pamina, vibrant in tone and generous in phrase, but insufficiently girlish and vulnerable. I can imagine she’ll make a lovely Gilda, however, when she sings the role in Glyndebourne’s production of Rigoletto touring later this year.
The excellent Gavan Ring plays Papageno as an amiable idiot in the manner of Father Dougal from sitcom Father Ted - a pleasing interpretation that would benefit from more ad libbing and interplay with the audience. Samantha Hay sails happily through the Queen of the Night’s coloratura, nailing the top notes cleanly and earning the evening’s warmest applause. At the other end of the vocal spectrum, John Savournin, doubling as the father of the little girl depicted in the overture, is a saturnine Sarastro – but how can one make this character seem anything more than a pompous bore?
Stalwarts of Opera North’s chorus Lorna James, Helen Evora and Amy J Payne makes a well-blended trio of attendant ladies, but the solemn majesty of the Speaker’s dialogue with Tamino isn’t communicated by the perfunctory delivery of Dean Robinson and Kang Wang. And if that episode – radiating Mozart’s genius at its most rawly sublime – doesn’t register strongly, any performance of this opera will lack heart and soul.
Still, it’s a good-looking show, colourfully designed by Colin Richmond and making imaginative use of Douglas O’Connell’s video. It also deserves credit for using Jeremy Sams’s fluent English translation without the prop of surtitles: did anyone complain about their absence, I wonder? The near-capacity audience seemed content and appreciative, but I felt the cracks in the edifice showed and I was left unenchanted.
Until March 1, in repertory with Katya Kabanova and The Rite of Spring and Gianni Schicchi. Also touring to Salford Quays, Nottingham and Newcastle. Tickets: 0844 878 2700; operanorth.co.uk