Mozart's The Magic Flute is is not easy to get right. Its multiple themes and mix of narrative-musical styles requires difficult decisions from directors when deciding where to invest their energies. Are they to focus on the vaudeville-style fun, the Enlightenment philosophical reflections, the narrative's fairytale elements or its dark undercurrents? Graham Vick's new production for the Macerata Opera Festival aims to do all of the above, and the result is an original conception that finds creative means to engage with the audience. Ultimately, however, this production lacks focus.
It has been a barnstorming 2017/18 season for Vick in Italy, who in new productions of Stiffelio and La bohème has succeeded in making these works feel acutely contemporary and relevant. In attempting to do the same with The Magic Flute, the director has returned to many of his favourite tropes. He sets the action against a backdrop of the struggles of the mass populace against the powers that be. A hundred Macerata residents, as well as immigrants residing in the city, have been enlisted as extras, recalling Vick's work with the Birmingham Opera Group, and play placard-wielding protestors seen both onstage and on the flanks in makeshift camps formed from tents and cars. Vick uses the Sferisterio's cavernous space inventively in a bid to immerse the audience in the action. When actors planted in the stalls shout encouragement to Tamino and Papageno during their trials we have the sense of the action taking place all around us. The audience is more directly involved when asked to sing the chorus to Sarastro's aria “O Isis und Osiris”.
Most radically, Vick has collaborated with Fedele d'Amico and Stefano Simone Pintor on a translation of the libretto into plain modern-day Italian. The new text has the immediacy and liveliness of pantomime and feels especially well-suited to expressing the dialogues' bawdier content. Vick makes the most of new opportunities for wordplay so that when the priests grant Papageno not a glass of wine but a joint, his aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” references the divine properties of cannabis.
The Magic Flute's roots in popular theatre come through most strongly throughout Vick's production, which sparkles with a wealth of witty detail. Tamino, first seen on a building site, is attacked by a digger rather than the customary serpent (his opening aria is sung from within its closed bucket). The three ladies that rush to save him wear hard hats and high visibility vests, transforming into seductresses after noting his beauty as they strip to reveal glam dresses below. Papageno is reimagined as a fried chicken delivery man, and the three child spirits –mischievous sprites who zoom around onstage on motorbikes – are fun.