Opera: The Magic Flute ★★½

Emanuel Schikaneder and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Komische Oper Berlin and 1927
Directed by Suzanne Andrade and Barrie Kosky
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth until Feb 23

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. (There are quite a few of them, in fact, but more on that later).
This is the first opera I’ve been to. Ever. I’ve always considered it elitist, wastefully expensive and artistically heavy-handed, despite some gorgeous music. Mutton overdressed as lamb.
But here I am at the Maj (a woman all but next to me confided her ticket had cost more than her flight from Melbourne to see the show), feeling a bit of a fraud. If you want to stop reading now, I completely understand.
But hang on a second. The motivating reason I’m here is my admiration for 1927, the innovative British theatre company (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, The Animals and the Children took to the Streets, Golem) who co-created this production with the Australian director Barrie Kosky, and they had never seen an opera either when he approached them to collaborate on the project. Didn’t even know what The Magic Flute was.
So I may be a neophyte, but I’m not alone.
For newcomers to the art of theatrical illusion that 1927 specialise in (you only have to look as far as The Great Tamer and Le Nor in this Perth Festival for other examples) the staging of this Magic Flute is undoubtedly novel and exciting.
But it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, an end in itself.
Once the novelty and excitement wear off, once the sight of singers suddenly appearing like climbers clinging to a rock face who suddenly feel the urge to sing loses its impact, the exercise becomes disjointed, schizophrenic and, surprisingly, a little dated.
The pace of Paul Barritt’s brilliant hallucinogenic animations on the opera’s vertical stage is at odds with Mozart’s repetitive score and Emanuel Schikaneder’s plodding, ludicrous libretto. Left with too much time on its hands, even they become tedious.
There is also an overlay of references, from Mozart/Schikaneder’s Masonic rantings, Egyptian and Greek mythology and other baloney to Barritt’s Weimar/silent movie era/Disney (hence the aforementioned Dumbos)/Wizard of Oz/pop-art incursions that ends up being overloaded, messy and confusing.
It also leaves the cast (notably Kim-Lillian Strebel and Adrian Strooper as the Orpheus and Euridyce-like lovers Pamina and Tamino, Tom Erik Lie as the comic Papageno and Aleksandra Olczyk as the Queen of the Night – she of the glass-shattering aria) somewhat sidelined, like kids not picked for a game in their own playground.
In the end, despite some individual images that are genuinely astounding, despite some impressive singing (from Strebel in particular) and some lovely music, the result is less than the sum of its parts.
It left me, untutored newcomer as I am, in a strange state of mind: overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time.