The Welsh National Opera returns to The Bristol Hippodrome this week. This season they arrive with another revival of Dominic Cooke’s 2005\u00a0surreal production of Mozart’s last opera, The Magic Flute.<\/p>\n
With its fairy tale characters, Enlightenment allegory and\u00a0Masonic references,\u00a0this production brings together the beauty of Mozart’s music with Cooke’s creative use of\u00a0Magritte\u00a0Surrealism throughout the design.<\/p>\n
From Tamino’s rescue from a giant killer lobster by the Three sinister Ladies, to Papageno desperately gathering up his offspring which are\u00a0popping up through trap doors in the stage, the audience is sucked into the strange world and the characters’ journey from darkness to light.<\/p>\n
Magic bells see baddies balletically leap\u00a0across the stage and the Magic Flute itself provides great amusement when it attracts a host of wild animals including a newspaper reading\u00a0lion spellbound by the music it produces.<\/p>\n
Of course, you can throw as much mystique into the design as possible, but for us, the ultimate success of a production of The Magic Flute comes down to two key things.<\/p>\n
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