This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY TIMES (Metro)

30th September 2007

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If you don’t already have a ticket for the William Kentridge production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, don’t waste your time by trying to get hold of one now – you’d have more luck buying a ticket for the Rugby World Cup Final in Paris next month. The remarkable popularity of the show, which opens at Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre next Saturday after a 10-day run in Cape Town, bears testimony not simply to the benefits of advance marketing by sponsors Rand Merchant Bank (if only the performing arts were always advertised in cinemas) but, moreover, to the high esteem in which Kentridge is held.

The production does not disappoint. It is a sensory feast in which the rousing arias of Mozart’s famous opera combine with rich costuming, intricate set design and, most impressively, Kentridge’s animations; these range from small drawings moving, magically, on stage props to grandiose projections across the backdrop. In his Director’s Note, Kentridge writes that “It is clear that this is too much. The best advice I can give is to let your eyes and ears follow as they will, and accept that a part of the production will be missed. This acceptance is better than an anxiety about not taking everything in.”

Opera purists might argue that, instead of complementing the music, the visual display competes for the audience’s attention and – remarkable as it is – distracts from Mozart’s work. Kentridge answers this criticism in advance: “Opera is an impure form. It interrupts listening to pure music with the demand that language must be heard, both joined to and separately from the music. Even more, we are asked to look, to add the different logic of visual comprehension to that of the auditory and reflective senses. Even in its most reduced and minimalist form, it is an overload.”

This is perhaps taking the point too far; after all, one of the reasons that opera is less popular today than it has been in the past is that it is perceived as offering sensory input of a limited (inaccessible, elitist, high-brow) kind. In this way, one of the joys of Kentridge’s production – which is never static, for if the characters aren’t moving, the set is, and the projections dance constantly – is that it can be enjoyed by a younger generation who, we are told, have a shorter attention span but can absorb a range of stimuli simultaneously. Various matinee performances have been set aside specifically for schools, with the score adapted for “children’s concerts” conducted by Richard Cock.

Of course, the barriers to the positive reception of opera are not merely generational but also historical. Mozart’s eighteenth-century milieu is not our own and his preoccupations are different from ours. The Magic Flute gives expression to the values of the Enlightenment: reason, order and that rather intangible thing called “wisdom” prevail over irrationality, chaos and ignorance. Furthermore, there are numerous references to the somewhat obscure symbols and rituals of Freemasonry. Kentridge’s exquisite animations bridge the gap between the composer’s era and our own, immersing the audience in visual representations of the Enlightenment obsession with “learning” in, for instance, mathematics and astronomy. There are also humorous moments – such as a rhinoceros doing circus tricks – which match the often light-hearted tone of Mozart’s libretto. Playful loops, twirls and curlicues, along with dissident shooting stars, break the rigid Enlightenment geometry and strict sense of order.

Indeed, these “rebellious streaks” expose some of the contradictions in the conception of The Magic Flute. The story, in brief, is that a young prince, Tamino, is sent by The Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the clutches of the tyrant Sarastro. Tamino is accompanied on his quest by Papageno, a well-meaning but cowardly and rather dim-witted soul. They discover that Sarastro is in fact a virtuous ruler who has taken Pamina from her mother because the Queen is a spiteful and destructive woman. Sarastro and the priests of Isis and Osiris set various tasks for Tamino and Papageno, which they undergo with some difficulty but successfully in the end, and they are rewarded with the gifts of love and wisdom. The problem is that The Magic Flute is a fantasy, and depends on precisely the “dark” elements that Sarastro-Mozart tries to repress. The opposites of good and evil, fortitude and weakness, forgiveness and vengeance, are intertwined in the plot: it is the Queen of the Night, supposedly anathema to the virtues espoused by Mozart, who provides Tamino with the magic flute of the title and who is given one of the most memorable and beautiful arias – certainly, the best-known – in the entire opera. In this, as elsewhere, it is evident that unreason and instinct (or “nature” in Enlightenment terms), though they can be ugly and vicious, are also a crucial part of the creative process.

FOR A REVIEW OF THIS PRODUCTION FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE, CLICK HERE