The ENO’s Magic Flute ignores everything that makes Mozart’s opera great

A new production of The Magic Flute is something to look forward to, if with apprehension. How many aspects of this protean masterpiece will it encompass, and how many will be neglected or distorted? The answer, in the case of Simon McBurney’s effort at the Coliseum, is that almost everything that contributes to the work’s greatness is ignored or reduced, so that an evening that should be spent in a state of growing elation merely induces irritation deepening to rage, with patches of life-draining boredom. Not that the first-night audience shared my view, to judge from the roar of applause that greeted the final curtain, and the frequent guffaws and outbursts of clapping during the work.

In his note in the programme, McBurney quotes Mozart writing in a letter to his wife after one of the earliest performances of Die Zauberflöte, ‘What gives me the greatest pleasure is the silent approval.’ The occasional audience silences at the Coliseum were indicative only of the inadequacies of some of the singing, though on the whole the musical side of the performance was less depressing than the dramatic side.

Not being much of a theatregoer, I haven’t seen any of McBurney’s productions with his Complicite company, but I gather they stress theatricality, which may be why there was a guy at the side of the stage writing on a blackboard, which was projected on to the front curtain, such informative things as ‘The Magic Flute, Act 1’ and near the end ‘Fire’, ‘Water’, ‘Triumph’, though none of those things could have come as news to a sentient audience — and, annoying as it was, why, having begun to inform us of what we already knew, didn’t that continue? It was indicative of the whole production that ideas weren’t followed through, there was no discernible continuity.