Certainly that is what Stuart Maunder hopes: We're not going for panto but you have to
Certainly that is what Stuart Maunder hopes: "We're not going for panto, but you have to highlight both sides of the opera. What we have tried to do is set out a logical Flute, with a fairy-tale feel. It takes place somewhere where you can believe in serpents and magic. In the end, it's almost in Star Wars territory: the struggle between Good and Evil."n British Youth Opera's 'The Magic Flute' is at the Wimbledon Theatre, London SW19, 3, 5, 7 Sept (0181-540 0362), and at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 10, 13 Sept (0131-529 6000). Each song in the show is loosely based on a Mozart theme, but we wanted a musical style rather like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a pastiche of different musical styles."The Magic Flute teeters on the cusp between Enlightenment and Romanticism, a position our era readily recognises That's one reason why the opera fascinates and infuriates. Our performers are actors and comics, rather than primarily singers, although our Queen, Atalanta Harmsworth, has sung at Ronnie Scott's.
The opera was written much more as a vaudeville, a comedy revue, than as the serious grand opera we're used to. The Queen of the Night would have had to hit those top notes night after night for a year, so we guess that the quality of the singing would have been very different from what we get now. The situations have been changed, but the characters, and the way they react to each other, don't change. Our Papageno is the same obsessive character as the original."If funds had been available, Chew would have gone further still: "My ideal would have been to have done it as music hall, with perhaps three acts interspersed with comics, bands, jugglers: a celebration of all the performing arts.
Her version, which has just played the Edinburgh Festival en route to London, moves further still from opera house conventions. As she explains, "It's a devised piece, telling the same story as Mozart's opera, but in our show Papageno, for example, is no longer a bird-catcher, he's the Queen of the Night's official soap-opera watcher, with a video collection of which he's very proud. Although Mozart and Schikaneder believe in the masons as a spiritual alternative to dogmatic religion, they are saying,'No life without women. Even though misogynistic things are said during the opera, they don't amount to a misogynistic message."Sarah V Chew, on the contrary, firmly asserts that the opera is "sexist, racist, every 'ist' you can possibly name, and I hope that there's something in our show that brings that to light in an amusing way". Don't be exclusive, be inclusive.' People say it's misogynistic, but I don't find that convincing. For me, he's a full-blooded visionary who, at the start of Act 2, is fighting for his political life in order to change things.""I don't think you've got a chance of doing the opera if you ignore its masonic side," insists Freeman. Yet his views otherwise echo Maunder's rather closely: "You have to translate it into humanity, rather than dead symbols.