These days, even The Royal Opera bills Mozart’s late Singspiel in Engish as The Magic Flute, but academic institutions like to honour the original German title. It was, then, Die Zauberflöte that opened this week at the Royal Academy of Music. Olivia Clarke conducted a lyrical yet zesty account of this adorable score, while the production by Jamie Manton was on the nose and off the wall. Reader, I loved it.
Perhaps inspired by Isabella Bywater's recent institutionalised Turn of the Screw at his directorial alma mater, ENO, Manton sets the entire opera inside a hospital. He begins not amid the rocky landscape of Schikaneder’s libretto but in an operating theatre, the serpent an anaesthetically-induced fever dream that so disturbs the patient, Tamino (for it is he), that it takes three intimidating nurses to hold him in check. The elbow-high black rubber gloves worn by the latter bring all manner of irrigations to mind – and things get ever more Carry On as the trio squabble over the scantily-clad patient’s mid-section. But why not? The opera is an exercise in low comedy and a reverential approach can only accentuate the scenario’s structural flaws.
The medical theme comes and goes across the evening, with Papageno a hospital orderly rather than a bird-catcher, a ballet of squeegee mops his aerial prey. The hallucinatory mood extends to a phosphorescent glow in the patients’ plasma packs as they perambulate, high on goodness knows what intravenous treats. No wonder the two Armed Men have no heads.
Manton’s economical production for Royal Academy Opera looks a million dollars thanks to the lighting wizardry of Charlie Morgan Jones, whose computer-driven bells and whistles turn the tired old trope of descending neon strips into a non-stop art installation. Even the titular flute is a hand-held length of hi-tech illumination. The lights are constantly on the move and coalesce with Justin Nardella’s travelling design elements to create an evening-long tapestry of visual effects, all rehearsed to perfection with ne’er a bump or knock from the singers.
Ah, the singers. How often with student productions do we make allowances for their age and inexperience? Not here. This was as poised and professional a performance as one could wish to hear. Zahid Siddiqui sang poetically as Tamino, while Grace Hope-Gill was a fragile yet lyrical Pamina and Daniel Vening a richly shaded Sarastro. As Papageno, Conrad Chatterton was outstanding: an engaging baritone with a humour so dry that I wish he, along with some of his colleagues, had been better served in directorial detail. An operatic baritone can be as mellifluous as you like, but as an actor he needs a platform whereon to shade his character and join the dots of his wit. This is where Manton could have done more.
No space remains to praise the rest of the cast by name; indeed, there’s barely room to marvel that almost an entirely different cast is alternating with these young prodigies. What a talent pool we have in this country, waiting in the wings for a career to beckon – if, as we must hope, the parlous state of the art is ever allowed to improve.