The Magic Flute review – dark, eclectic and disquieting

James Brining’s new production of The Magic Flute for Opera North opens with a young girl sitting on her bed, listening to a recording of the opera we are about to watch. Visible beyond the doors of her room, a somewhat tense dinner party is taking place, at which the relationships between some of the guests resemble those of Mozart’s characters. During a pause in the overture, we hear a man saying grace, whom we we will later identify with Sarastro. A loud bang at the door heralds the arrival of an irate woman, possibly the girl’s mother and clearly an unwanted guest, who will become the Queen of the Night. A second woman, who could be Pamina, brings the girl her supper, and settles her for the night. The opera subsequently plays itself out, we are led to assume, in the girl’s imagination. Or does it?

In keeping with a work in which appearances repeatedly prove deceptive, Brining never returns to the scene of the opening, though we glimpse the girl throughout the production, either among the members of Sarastro’s community or as one of Papageno’s children. Instead, Brining embarks upon an eclectic, at times disquieting phantasmagoria that probes the opera’s darker contradictions and ambiguities, in terms, he tells us in a programme note, drawn from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with its idea of progress as the product of tension between contrary forces and its vision that “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence”.

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By no means the first director to view Sarastro’s authority as restrictive, Brining contrasts the oppressive sobriety of his community with the greater emotional freedoms of the world beyond. The red-clad nuns who serve Sarastro’s priests and bear their children remind us of Margaret Atwood’s handmaids, and in an insidiously nasty touch we eventually discover that not only John Findon’s repellent Monostatos but also John Savournin’s high-minded Sarastro are controlling Vuvu Mpofu’s rebellious Pamina by means of sedation. Samantha Hay’s vindictive Queen of the Night wants to destroy Sarastro’s world by attacking it from without, but it becomes apparent that transformation can only come from within. Papagena (Amy Freston) is reimagined as a disaffected community member, who finally escapes with Gavan Ring’s endearing Papageno. Pamina’s eventual admission as the consort of Kang Wang’s Tamino ultimately impels the community’s women to tear off their veils and reclaim their identities.

Though at times impressive, the result can be heavy handed. It is often left to the cast to supply the charm and grace that offsets and heightens the work’s profundities. Mpofu and Kang are excellent as the central couple: he sounds entirely at ease in a role that many tenors find exacting; Mpofu, on this showing, is an exemplary Mozartian, with sumptuous tone and exquisite phrasing. Ring makes an attractive Papageno – funny, astute, at times extremely touching. Hay sings with lethal accuracy, her high Fs comfortably in place. Savournin, though lighter-voiced than some Sarastros, exudes a slightly sinister charisma, suited to Brining’s view of his character. Conductor Robert Howarth propels the score forward with great urgency and clarity, though the period-style playing took a while to settle on opening night.

• At Grand theatre, Leeds, until 1 March. Then touring.