Dream ticket

Spoiler alert: it’s all a dream. At least, I think that’s what we’re meant to take away from the business with which director James Brining accompanies the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A little girl in ochre pyjamas is trying to sleep while in an adjacent room braying, guffawing adults sit down to a formal dinner. Servants bustle about, and there’s a suggestion that all is not well in the hosts’ marriage. Then sleep descends with a David Lynch-like fizzle of electric lights and we’re pitched into a world of princes, serpents and enchantment.

Opera directors love unloading on overtures: obscuring the composer’s own musical pathway into their world with elaborately mimed footnotes to a text you haven’t yet read. It’s Brining’s only major miscalculation, and one that might perhaps be remedied by taking a billhook to about 75 per cent of that quaffing and faffing. Bank the idea of a divided family in a convention-bound society, remember that little girl, and then enjoy an imaginative, compassionate and slightly spooky ride through Mozart and Schikaneder’s Enlightenment fairy tale.

So dream logic prevails, and that’s fine. Dream logic is what gives The Magic Flute both its ramshackle narrative coherence and its profound truth. Artur Schnabel supposedly said that Mozart’s piano sonatas are too simple for children but too difficult for adults, and in my experience it’s only adults who struggle with The Magic Flute. Kids get it. The girl (she doesn’t receive a distinct credit in the programme) pops up throughout the action — part Nutcracker Clara, part Alice in Wonderland, charmingly indicating the best possible perspective from which to understand all this stuff about bird-catchers and sevenfold signs of the sun.

Colin Richmond’s sets create a shifting labyrinth of grand hallways and corridors, lit with an eerie De Chirico glow and occasionally transforming into a forest of trees with blood-red roots.