The exhilarating achievement of Simon McBurney’s highly engaging production of Mozart’s Magic Flute for ENO, first seen at the Coliseum in 2013, is to draw its audience in by returning the piece to its roots as an eclectic entertainment. The unique theatrical personality of the piece is captured right from the start, with the orchestra raised from the pit to become very much part of a stage show that evolves around them and in which, in the case of the flautist and the celeste player, they actively participate.
The inventiveness of the production reaches out to the audience – we see the sound effects being created and the screen projections being created – and the evocation of Papageno’s birds by fluttering paper is the more memorable for being such a simple idea. Occasionally the characters chase one another through the stalls as if this was a pantomime, which in a way it absolutely is. There is no definitive way of doing this opera, but in my experience few productions of The Magic Flute capture the popular theatrical spirit of the piece better.
Add to this the compelling conducting of Mark Wigglesworth – who is now an artistic rock at the financially beleaguered ENO – some fine work by the company’s austerity-threatened chorus, and London’s best sung Pamina in years from Lucy Crowe, and you may be asking: why four stars not five for this revival?
The answers start with the fact that vocal standards, though decent enough – Allan Clayton a good Tamino, Ambur Braid a mostly effective Queen of the Night, Peter Coleman-Wright reliable as always but too middle-aged for Papageno – cannot match the cut-through standard set by Crowe, a fact that surely reflects ENO’s failure to sufficiently nurture a corps of home-grown principals. And for all its beguiling industriousness and creativity – the trials by fire and water are excellently done – the staging in the end falls frustratingly short of the great enlightenment experience that Mozart’s music demands.
• At the Coliseum, London, until 19 March. Buy tickets from guardianboxoffice.com.
