SUCH was the stir created by Mozart's opera The Magic white when it opened at the Freihaustheater auf der Wieden in Vienna on September 30th, 1791 that the following spring King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, keen to see the piece performed on his own turf, asked the director of the National Theater in Berlin to go and see the show and suggest how it might be adapted for a Prussian audience. The report of Professor Johann Jakob Engel, submitted in March 1792, was not to put it mildly optimistic.
"The author," declared professor Engel, "appears to have had no other purpose than to create all conceivable difficulties for the stage machinist and set designer, so that a work has come into being whose entire merit lies in its being a joy to behold. At all events, an audience unfamiliar with certain mysteries and unable to penetrate the dark and heavy veil of allegory will certainly not be able to derive any interest from it. I regret that so great a composer as Mozart was obliged to squander his talent on so than Mess, mystical and untheatrical a subject.
Well, if you're going to get it wrong, you might as well get it wrong in style. Professor Engel notwithstanding, The Magic Flute has always been one of the most popular pieces in the standard repertoire; mysteries or no, audiences all over the world have taken it to their hearts. It has been translated into Czech, Polish, Romanian, Flemish, Croatian, Finnish and Hungarian.
A French adaptation in 1801 saw the text completely rewritten with plenty of nods and winks in the direction of Napoleon's capture of Cairo. It received its 500th performance in Berlin in 1905; it has been staged as "the fairy tale to end all fairy tales", and as a "mythological parable". It has withstood the onslaughts of producers who wanted to stress its Masonic symbolism at all costs and those who wanted to leave out all that Egypty stuff altogether.
Opera Theatre Company's desire to put on a version of the opera which would appeal to children as much as to adults seems almost tame by comparison until you talk to the director, designer and conductor of the OTC/ESB Magic Flute, that is, and hear them pepper their conversation with references to Star Wars and music videos and how convenient it is to have the set available right through the rehearsal period so that people can jump in and out of it. Whatever else this Magic Flute turns out to be, tame it almost certainly won't be.
"We want to make big statements," says director Susie Kennedy, who has made one or two of those already in her time as artistic director of TEAM theatre company. "We want to draw very clear, clean lines. The opera is about the battle between good and evil, it's about love, it's about marriage and families - so we want to present clear images. For instance, when Tamino falls in love with the portrait of Pamina, he normally has a locket or a little picture in his hand - but we'll have a doll, so that it's immediately obvious to everybody that this represents Pamina." At the same time, she stresses, this is in no way a pantomime version of the piece; the characters will be worked out in a realistic fashion, not as cartoon versions.
The same goes for the colours, says designer Joanna Taylor. "Just because it's designed to appeal to children doesn't mean letting the colours go all over the place. In fact we've used a very limited palette of predominantly warm colours, with hand dyed fabrics and costumes which have a vaguely Middle Eastern look but are not tied to any specific place or time. Sarastro is in that wonderful blue that everybody associates with spiritually, and Taminn's suit is of green silk." The set, she says, aims to work together with the fluidity of the music; "so it's all windows hidden in walls, doors opening and closing to create a magical effect, constant movement."
It was conductor Andrew Synnott who had to cut the famous score down to size. "I came up with a version that I thought would make sense dramatically, and then the gaps were gradually filled in," he explains. One of the earliest gaps to be filled, to everyone's relief, was that of a flute player "imagine The Magic Flute without a flute!" courtesy of a sponsorship package from the ESB.
But if you're going to do a version of the opera rather than the opera itself, should you not rename the piece, as did the French company which produced a children's version of the work several years ago called La Petite Flute Enchantee? "No, I don't think so, because Mozart has already done all the hard work in writing all this ultra sophisticated music," says Synnott. "In some respects we're trading on the name The Magic Flute - and it's such a well known opera that that's a double edged sword, in a way. It's kind of dicey cutting one of the acknowledged masterpieces of world opera. But we're not trying to improve it, just to make a story that will work within its own parameters.
"Obviously you lose some of the numbers that, as a conductor, you'd like to keep, and there's a certain amount of tearing your hair out over what has to be dropped. But that's inevitable - and all the famous numbers are still there, so don't worry."
WHAT, then, has been lost? "About an hour! and a half;" quips Joanna Taylor. "But seriously," says Susie Kennedy. "The dialogue. Most of that is gone. The three boys: gone. The armed men: gone. The Masonic symbolism: gone." The trials which Tamino has to undergo in order to reach enlightenment are still there, though - and will be "in your face" trials, at that.
"I don't know about you," says Susie Kennedy, "but it doesn't convince me dramatically if somebody goes offstage for their trial and then comes back on stage and says `phew! That was a really hard trial'. You need to see it."
To add to the trial by fire there will be a spider's web trial; Tamino and Papageno have to find the missing piece of the Magic Circle of the Sun and give it back to Sarastro; if they succeed (or when, actually let's face it, we all know there's a happy ending) they will be rewarded by marriage to Pamino and Papagena.
The appeal of all this to children is obvious, and will be enhanced through a series of primary school workshops in which members of the cast will take part on the day of each performance.
But what about the appeal to adults? No problem, says Susie Kennedy. "We want people who would normally never go to opera to come and see it and say, `Wow! Was that opera? That was great!' We also want people who do normally go to opera to come and say, `Well, that was satisfying - it wasn't all there, but it was satisfying'." And if they pull it off, what next? Wagner's Ring cycle in two hours? `Yeah," says Joanna Taylor. "On roller skates."
