The Magic Flute means many things to many people, ranging between its two narrative poles of a serious story or Bildungsroman about enlightenment from the forces of darkness and evil (represented by Tamino and Pamina) and a comic tale of human weakness overcome by patience and compassion (represented by Papageno and Papagena). The temper of Richard Studer’s production for West Green leans firmly towards the latter as more a piece of light-hearted music theatre, where even the serious characters and the situations they find themselves in are treated with a degree of levity. A theatre on stage implies a play-within-a-play, perhaps harking back to Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated film version of the opera, though the ethos here is rather different otherwise and somewhat confused. The frame of that theatre presents a Renaissance facade around a monumental Egyptian landscape like the Valley of the Kings, though ‘Orlando furioso’ is also written on the front with no obvious connection with the drama. A sun and moon preside over the extremes of the stage to symbolise the opera’s darkness-to-light plot, with statues in niches for the wings, receding along the sides in perspective like the theatres of the 18th century.
In the staging itself there is the whiff of a stern Victorian governess about the Queen of the Night and her assistants, the Three Ladies, with their bustle dresses, though the costumes of the latter are modified suggestively to suggest a vaudeville dance troupe, bringing together the appearance of a comic drama somewhere between G & S and Offenbach. More intriguingly, although Papageno is dressed up in standard bird-like pantaloons, the forces opposed to him and Tamino also have something of the avian about them – feathers adorn the Queen, her Ladies, and Monostatos. Stranger, and unexplained, is the purple chicken-like creature with a gas mask, and yellow Marigold gloves for talons which stands in for the fearsome serpent which threatens Tamino. If Studer means to make some novel connection between Papageno and the forces of evil, it isn’t explored further.
For all the fun and energy which the musicians bring to the performance, a contrasting sense of the work’s solemnity is underplayed, even if it’s not entirely absent and is to some extent inevitable in a small-scale country house garden production with a reduced scoring which does without any brass except for one horn in the West Green Opera Orchestra, and no chorus (so that choral sections are taken simply as the soloists in ensemble). The music often has the intimacy of chamber music, or particularly of that quintessentially Viennese genre of Harmoniemusik when the woodwind come to the fore in place of brass, just as popular numbers from operas in Mozart’s era were often arranged for wind band. Conductor Jonathan Lyness invests the score with brisk, even breathless drive, which keeps up a lively pace when needed alongside a minimum amount of spoken dialogue. But there could be more nuance in tempo and dynamics between numbers, as well as within them, for instance in Pamina and Papageno’s touching duet in Act One, or those movements of Act Two in which more of the mysteries of the temple are revealed – the two choruses addressed to Isis and Osiris, and Sarastro’s aria.
The performers sing enthusiastically, perhaps too much so in the small space of the auditorium at West Green – for all William Morgan and Mark Nathan’s fervour as Tamino and Papageno respectively, the audience is more sung at rather than brought within the drama being acted out at close range in front of them. It’s a peculiar balance when Nazan Fikret’s Queen of the Night, with her precisely and carefully placed coloratura, comes across as not the most strident character. Sion Goronwy’s Sarastro is initially rather gruff and impatient, but he softens to become more neutral for Act Two.
As Pamina, Harriet Eyley projects clearly and urgently, but the generally brisk pace works against the deeper sentiments of the two numbers in which she plays a principal role – the aforementioned duet, and her affecting Act Two aria ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’. The Three Ladies of Galina Averina, Lowri Probert and Georgia Mae Bishop, and Peter Van Hulle’s Monostatos are characterful and playful rather than menacing, the latter a touch wobbly also. The Three Boys – dressed as such but rendered here as ‘Spirits’ and given the odd other cameo role beyond the original scenario – blend well and mellifluously in tone; it’s a pity their Act Two number is cut. There are high spirits aplenty in this performance, but without a keener sense of contrast between the sublime and the jovial, light and darkness, the opera’s ultimate triumph passes for less than it should. The illuminations in the gardens after the performance – as beautiful as ever – go some way to replicate the interplay of the latter duality.
