Opera: The Magic Flute

Leeds Grand Theatre (0844-848 2700), until 1 March, then touring Running time: 2hrs 45mins ★★★

Any director charged with making sense of The Magic Flute has my sympathies, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. Striking a balance between the “elements of innocent pantomime and abstruse Freemasonry” is tricky enough. Then there’s the problem of its incoherent narrative – a quest for love and enlightenment full of “knots or dead ends”, and featuring a “good guy” (Sarastro) who’s just as nasty as the villainous Queen of the Night. James Brining, the artistic director of Leeds Playhouse, here making his opera debut, makes a decent fist of the challenges. It’s a good-looking staging, which makes imaginative use of video. There are illuminating suggestions of a Handmaid’s Tale- style cultish set-up. And Brining deserves credit for using Jeremy Sams’s fluent English translation. But although the audience in Leeds was warmly appreciative, I remained ultimately “unenchanted”; this is a modest success rather than a triumph.

“If only they had stopped after the overture!” said Richard Morrison in The Times. Had they done so, we’d be hailing Brining as a genius for the clever, dramatic dumbshow he concocts for that “sizzling” overture. We see a young girl put on a Mozart LP as her nanny ushers her off to bed. Her dad, meanwhile, is holding a dinner party that is crashed by her estranged mother. An emotional tug of war ensues, and as the girl falls asleep, her dad morphs into Sarastro, her mum into the Queen of the Night, the nanny into Pamina and a dodgy uncle into Monostatos. Alas, we don’t return to this intriguing framing story at the end, and what we do get is mostly a “cluttered conventional staging enlivened by whizzy video effects”.

It’s better than that, said Tim Ashley in The Guardian. This staging, which will tour to Salford, Newcastle and Nottingham, evokes an “eclectic, at times disquieting phantasmagoria” that probes the opera’s dark contradictions. And the core cast are strong. Kang Wang is at ease in the exacting role of Tamino, and Vuvu Mpofu as Pamina is an “exemplary Mozartian” with sumptuous tone and exquisite phrasing.