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John Longmuir as Tamino in The Magic Flute, Opera Australia
John Longmuir as Tamino in The Magic Flute, Opera Australia Photograph: Branco Gaica/Opera Australia
John Longmuir as Tamino in The Magic Flute, Opera Australia Photograph: Branco Gaica/Opera Australia

The Magic Flute – review

This article is more than 10 years old

Sydney Opera House, Sydney

It’s a rare opera production that can unite both young children, critics and Bronwyn Bishop (spotted at the interval) in admiration, but Opera Australia’s production of The Magic Flute manages it. Originally directed by Julie Taymor (famed for her production of The Lion King and, less happily, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark) at the New York Met in 2004, it matches Mozart’s most effervescent music with visuals which are every bit as thrilling.

Over the course of two hours, on a set which resembles a giant Perspex washing machine decorated with esoteric religious symbols (the opera is Mozart's tribute to the Freemasons), we see gigantic puppet polar bears, three women with detatchable heads, a Queen of the Night boasting multiple, ever-moving geometric wings, and the three boy spirits looking like minature Methelusahs in white lycra, frightwigs and beards. The stage goes right into the audience, though there’s a hole through which we can just about see the orchestra, and from time to time puppet birds and other creatures seem to be flying right above our heads.

Recent productions of The Magic Flute have ranged from the elaborate to the minimal (for instance, Peter Brook’s version, which swapped the orchestra for a piano and had a set consisting of a few pieces of bamboo), but Taymor’s maximal take has to be one of the most dazzling ever to have been staged. The proof that it is engaging even the most demanding members of the audience – despite the hurdles opera can put up to newcomers – comes during one of the spoken interludes in the second half, when the hero Tamino (sung by John Longmuir) counts through his three trials and a small child raptly calls out “two!”

The spectacle never ceases – there is always something great to look at – but the performers aren’t overwhelmed. Andrew Jones as Papageno, dressed in a lime-green all-in-one complete with wire codpiece (which briefly becomes the padlock stopping his tongue), delightfully alternates between boldness in song and a sweet vulnerability when he delivers the spoken dialogue. As Queen of the Night, Milica Ilic stops the show twice with two of opera’s most stratospheric arias. At the other end of the musical scale, the bass Morris Robinson gives Sarastro a cosmic gravitas.

The two pairs of lovers move innocently through this phantasmagoria, a highlight coming when Papagena turns from an old lady wearing so many rags that she resembles a Komondor dog into the woman of Papageno’s dreams. It’s just one moment of transformation among many in a production which will – and no doubt has already – change the way people think about, and stage, opera.

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