Opera: Die Zauberflöte
Glyndebourne, Lewes, East Sussex (01273-815000). Until 24 August Running time: 4hrs 30mins (incl. interval) ★★
Since the first production of The
Magic Flute in the 1790s, this famously tricky “allegorical pantomime” of an opera has invited all manner of imaginative interpretations, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. In recent years, I’ve seen Julie Taymor’s Lion King approach at the Met; a staging in the Bois de Boulogne that used live animals for Sarastro’s menagerie; and Barrie Kosky’s brilliant use of CGI and video. All these approaches offered “pleasure and enlightenment” – and would have pleased the “liberal spirits” of Mozart and his librettist Schikaneder. Alas, both men would surely be “aghast at the meaningless, tasteless, pointless, gimmicky mish-mash” that the director-designer partnership of André Barbe and Renaud Doucet have come up with for this year’s Glyndebourne festival – presumably “at great expense and investment of time”.
Barbe and Doucet’s big idea is to place the action in a 1900s Viennese grand hotel, said Richard Morrison in The Times. The female proprietor (the Queen of the Night) and her female staff are “very occasionally, outraged suffragettes” rebelling against the male closed-shop operated in the kitchen by the head chef (Sarastro). But the concept is silly: if the Queen owns the hotel, why can’t she just sack her misogynistic chef? The ending, with Sarastro and chums all converted to the cause of women’s suffrage, is “preposterously trite”. To make things worse, the thing is staged, uncut, with a “hearse-paced earnestness”, and the pristine periodinstrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a “complete mismatch” for the funereal tempos of conductor Ryan Wigglesworth.
The staging is a foggy “nonsense”, agreed Richard Fairman in the FT. But some of the singing is very good, in particular Caroline Wettergreen as the Queen, and Brindley Sherratt as an “imposing, deeply sonorous Sarastro”. And visually, this production is a “theatrical feast of eccentricity”, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. Every room is created from Barbe’s pen-and-ink backdrops, and there are plenty of design tricks and surprises to admire. Admittedly, the evening is long and the – at times bizarre – staging hard to follow. But nobody ever left The Magic Flute “thinking it made perfect sense”.