Opera director criticised by Italy’s Right wing over ‘anti-racist’ play

A BRITISH opera director has been criticised by Italian MPS after staging an “anti-racist” performance of The Magic Flute featuring a bulldozer poised to raze a migrant tent camp.

Graham Vick, of the Birmingham Opera Company and a former director of Glyndebourne, revised the original plot in an experimental production at the Macerata opera festival.

“This is a massacre damaging Mozart,” said Paolo Arrigoni, a senator of the Right-wing League party.

Some spectators booed at the performance on Friday. In Mr Vick’s version, the serpent in the tale is replaced by a bulldozer, seen by League MPS as “Salvinian” because Matteo Salvini, their leader, once called for gipsy Roma camps to be razed. At one point, members of the choir fell down, in what some critics took to be miming the fate of drowning migrants.

Mr Arrigoni asked why Mr Vicks had not included a reference to Pamela Mastropietro, an 18-year-old woman who was murdered in Macerata by a Nigerian drug dealer. Her murder inspired an attack by a Right-wing gunman who went on a shooting spree in the region and targeted Africans, wounding six.

Tullio Patasini, another League MP, said: “It is absurd to use theatre to justify flawed immigration policy.”

In the opera, Mr Vick identifies what he says are the three ills of modern society – banks, Apple and the Catholic Church. Around 100 local people are in the show, shouting slogans in a kind of Greek chorus. It runs until Aug 12.

Mr Vick said that he hoped his production would act as “a punch in the stomach”. Mario Morgoni, an MP for the Left-wing Democratic Party, hit back at the League: “Among the acts that prepare the way for anti-democratic regimes, intolerance of culture and art are the most disturbing.

“I won’t go into the merits of the cultural event, though it was appreciated, but political mudslinging against this show is frankly grotesque.”