Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 13 November 2003

MOZART, in da Opera house! To see an audience helpless with laughter during a night at the opera is an unusual occurrence, but this was the achievement of Scottish Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute which visited Eden Court recently.

This opera, or rather Singspiel, the 18th-century equivalent of a musical, is a curious blend of Masonic symbolism and knock-about comedy, and modern directors are faced with a number of problems when producing the work. The brilliant solution arrived at by director Jonathan Moore was to use an aggressively up-dated translation by Kit Hesketh-Harvey to set the piece in a contemporary context.

The nowadays rather obscure Masonic elements are transformed into allusions to The Matrix, while the cult of Isis and Osiris, becomes the Isis and Osiris Mission, a sort of ritualistic space programme. This permits what has to be the most arresting opening image of any Scottish Opera production to date, an astronaut in full space-walk gear floating slowly across a lunar landscape.

Comedy is notoriously difficult to update successfully, but Hesketh-Harvey’s witty, urbane and elegant translation simply bristles with contemporary popular resonances from Ali G. and Red Dwarf to Morcambe and Wise and Acorn Antiques. The Three Boys in baggy gear and baseball caps, engaging in stylised drive-by gesturing in the manner of an LA gang was just one part of a constant stream of allusion, in which libretto and production appealed directly to the audience’s experience in the same way as Schikaneder’s 1791 production would undoubtedly have done.

Resurrecting opera from the safe obscurity of a foreign tongue and a long-dead context places considerable demands upon the performers, who are called on to deliver a daunting range of acting skills. Roland Wood’s memorable portrayal of the comic bird-catcher Papageno involved comic xylophone playing and stand-up comedy with a bawdy edge, which had the audience in stitches, while his avine partner Papagena was beautifully played by Benedikte Moes.

The two enigmatically symbolic trio ensembles, the Three Boys and Three Ladies, the classical precursors of Wagner’s Rhine Maidens and Norns, were perfectly gauged to fulfil their comic and serious functions in the drama. The excellent Mark Wilde and Gail Pearson were a versatile and vocally impressive Pamino and Tamina, who moved with consummate ease between the comic and the tragic.

Jennifer Rhys-Davis’s intense Queen of the Night and Tim Mirfin’s towering Sarastro added considerable gravitas to the serious threads of the opera, and if this darker misogynistic dimension of the piece was slightly less well served by the translation which sometimes in this context sounded just a little glib, powerful direction and the austerely beautiful set helped to restore the balance.

As ever, the Orchestra of Scottish Opera under the dynamic baton of Vincent de Kort made a superbly musical contribution, with Ruari Donaldson’s military sounding Baroque timpani adding a powerful edge to the sound. If you missed this witty and thought-provoking production, I strongly recommend you check it out when it returns to Edinburgh in January 2004. It is enormously encouraging to see an opera company which could have been forgiven for resting on its laurels after its summertime coup with Wagner’s Ring triumphantly taking on such a challenge. Big it up for Scottish Opera! respec’.

© D James Ross, 2003