Zauberflöte
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Royal Academy Opera
Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music
Faced with such an incomprehensible narrative as Zauberflöte every director has to find a way of making some sort of sense of it. Jamie Morton and his design team set it in a hospital and why not? The whole thing is conceived as Tamino’s drugged dreams and nightmares as he lies in intensive care, ventilated and sedated. Thus, the three ladies become sinister nurses, Papageno and Papagena are cleaners, Pamina is his anxious bedside girlfriend and Sarastro a benign authoritarian consultant. It isn’t quite clear where The Queen of the Night and Monostatos fit into this conceit but never mind. Lots of ensemble tableaux (Royal Academy Opera Chorus), with drip stands, wheelchairs, crutches and the like, help to nail the ambience. I’m not sure that Mozart or his librettist, Emmanuel Schikaneder, would have recognised it but hey, this is 2025 so that’s fine.
All the principals role-share across the four performances. On 18th March, which was Press Night, I saw a strong cast amongst whom Conrad Chatterton is outstanding as Papageno – rueful, pragmatic and with a gift for making those familiar numbers sound as if you’ve never heard them before. He uses his physicality well too as he towers above almost everyone else on stage. Monostatos is probably the hardest role to bring off because it’s difficult to fathom who or what he’s actually meant to be. Clad in Wizard-like robes, an intriguing headdress and doing a lot of writhing, Owen Lucas makes him feel enjoyably sinister. Grace Hope-Gill finds all the puzzled wistfulness Pamina needs and as her mother, Binny Supin Yang, dressed in shiny PVC, hits all those show-stopping top notes with menacing enthusiasm.
My biggest issue with this production is lighting, designed by Charlie Morgan-Jones. Of course, it’s meant to be hazy – we’re inside one man’s hallucinations but 2 hours and 35 minutes is a long time to watch something so relentlessly dark, with more stage smoke than I’ve seen in ages, that one was soon longing for a scene or two in which one could actually see what was going on. Second, the main lighting/stage design device is a quasi canopy of glowing tubes to connote institutional strip lights. These pointlessly change colour, re-angle and rise up and down continuously until it becomes a distracting irritant.
That’s a minor gripe, though. It’s a treat to see emerging singers delivering a generally pleasing production. I admire the decision to play this in the original German which must have been a challenge for some cast members but they rise to it with aplomb. Moreover, as always, Royal Academy Sinfonia, conducted this time by Olivia Clarke, are well balanced and supportive. Clarke is adept at allowing the audience to hear the musical detail – especially in the magical moment with flute (Sofia Patterson-Gutierrz) and timp (Anna Fyi).
