Given the popularity of WNO's current production of Mozart's The Magic Flute, it's a wonder director Dominic Cooke hasn't taken on other work for the company.
He is primarily a theatre director, and perhaps for that reason brought to Mozart's masterpiece in 2008 the laugh-out-loud comic touches and quirkiness that his more reverential colleagues might have declined to countenance.
Not that designer Julian Crouch’s vision, with its giant lobster replacing Schikaneder's original serpent, its trap doors and its brotherhood dressed in orange Masonic garb, takes anything away from the music.
In this revival, the way Jeremy Sams’s English translation leavens the atmosphere of psychobabble is even more pronounced. Laughs roll out as the protagonists confront and deal with the opera’s weird procession of characters, from the trio of Ladies in their raunchy petticoats to the three boy guides, aloft on their Heath-Robinson cycle, resembling renegades from the Vienna Boys Choir.
Thanks to conductor Gareth Jones's attention to tone and tempo in the pit, the stage pictures both divert and disturb as the production oscillates between low comedy and high seriousness. If I had anything to do with it, Jones would be seen far more often in charge of WNO performances of Classical opera
Newport-born Neal Davies further strengthens his portrayal of Papageno, marrying confidence in comic acting to richness of voice. Claire Hampton's Papagena is his ideal partner.
Peter Wedd reprises his ardent Tamino and Elizabeth Watts is a beautifully sung Pamina. A cadaverous Monostatos is played by Howard Kirk and Sarastro by an imperial Tim Mirfin. Laure Meloy, as ever, copes regally with the Queen of the Night’s high Fs.
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