The Magic Flute – review

Tamino sits in the audience, an ordinary punter ready for a night out. But by the end of the overture, he has been dragged up on stage by the impresario of a Victorian music hall called Sarastro's and set to playing an amorous prince questing for distressed damsels. It's a clever conceit, and is delivered, like so much of Scottish Opera's new production, with endearing wit and charm.

That impresario turns out to be Papageno, which works on several levels. The historical twist is this: Schikaneder, the impresario who commissioned Mozart's opera, wrote its libretto and played the first Papageno. That the jester is in fact running the show offers a neat take on an opera rife with misogyny and masonic symbolism. Equally, seeing Tamino being bundled into his prince costume and shown his script adds playful ambiguity to his involvement in the drama, as if subsequent events unfold between quotation marks. He is acting the part and saying the lines, but becomes increasingly convinced by his own performance – and by the end is utterly sold.

Meanwhile, inside Sarastro's is a whole world of steampunk Victoriana: cogs and chimneys, chaises longues with macabre fetish feet. Monostatos is into bondage, and the chorus is done up as miners and shipyard workers, scientists, nurses and foremen. It's a feast of visual detail, often quoting industrial-age Glasgow. Director Thomas Allen has sung Papageno enough times to know the opera inside-out and it shows: he remains a singer's director, keeping movement simple to let his cast sing their best. Richard Burkhard's excellent Papageno is full-voiced and sweetly funny. Nicky Spence is a perfect fit as Tamino, an easy actor with a smooth, bright tenor. Laura Mitchell makes a lovely Pamina, but Mari Moriya was a ropey Queen of the Night and Jonathan Best couldn't reach Sarastro's low notes. The orchestra plodded through the overture but later delivered spruce playing under Ekhart Wycik.

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