The Lir, Dublin

Opera Theatre Company’s long, long Irish tour of Mozart’s

Magic Flute

got under way on Friday night in the Lir theatre.

It’s a small venue, a good example of what’s to come on the long road to the final performance in Carlow on February 18th. As so often, OTC makes “small” work well: black-box space fully and imaginatively utilised; a fine six-piece ensemble playing Cameron Sinclair’s faithful pocket adaptation under clear, responsive direction from the piano of OTC debutante Brenda Hurley; minimal but judicious props; fresh young cast with several in multiple roles.

But if you’re under the impression that Mozart’s personality was impish and impudent, then what would have won you over was the delightful, mischievous balancing act performed by director Annilese Miskimmon between comic and serious.

Happily, her balance favoured the comic – many Magic Fluteshave the life abruptly drained out of them by a stodgy reverence for Mozart's Freemason-alluding temple brotherhood. Miskimmon channels Mozart and pokes fun at the order and at pomp in general, providing great comic space for Eoin Hynes and Nathan Morrison (priests, slaves, etc) and Lawrence Thackeray (Monostatos), all emphatically proving their worth as beneficiaries of OTC's Young Associate Artists' programme.

While all three were always potential scene-stealers, the clear leader in this department is Owen Gilhooly as Papageno. Never straying into slapstick, always vividly inhabiting the opera’s most human and sympathetic character, Gilhooly matched his fine comic timing and presence with his customarily refined singing.

It’s inevitably less fun for the straight roles, but these performers acquitted themselves well, with Adrian Dwyer as Tamino, Emma Morwood as Pamina, and Matthew Trevino as Sarastro. The Three Ladies (Mary O’Sullivan, Joan O’Malley and Mihaela Loredana Chivase) always sustained the spirit and energy of the moment, and a very self-composed trio of young trebles played the Three Boys. Soprano Alison Bell, although her wider vibrato distinguished her from everyone else in the cast, had no trouble hitting her stratospheric top notes as the Queen of the Night.

Under Miskimmon’s pacey direction, the design team wittily lights and sets the story in roughly 1912 – we see suffragettes, Monostatos is a London bobby. In all it precisely fulfils OTC chairperson Virginia Kerr’s wish that “an evening at the opera take us out of ourselves and lift our spirits”.