Review: Luca Silvestrini’s The Magic Flute – unusual and magical dance theatre

Luca Silvestrini is carving a niche in presenting small-scale, yet spectacular, pre-Christmas children’s shows. Following on from his inventive take on The Little Prince comes this unusual and magical dance theatre inspired by Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute. Silvestrini has previous with the opera since he directed a production at Ancona’s Fondazione Teatro Delle Muse, in 2023, and it was this experience that inspired the choreographer to consider making the opera into dance theatre for children (although, in truth, the outcome is a work for all ages).

Silvestrini also turned to the legendary Swedish film and theatre director, Ingmar Bergman, and his 1975 film of the opera, initially made for television, which sets the activities of Papageno and crew back in the late eighteenth century, when it was premiered in 1791 – the last complete work before Mozart’s death.

Silvestrini’s direction is faithful to the Singspiel of the opera where spoken dialogue is mixed with music and song, and he also gives the production a pantomime feel that is both true to the joyful warmth and slapstick humour of the Bergman film and of the British Christmas tradition.

The story tells of Prince Tamino’s quest to find and rescue the princess Pamina from the ambiguous Sarastro (is he her abductor or, as Bergman posited, her father, or perhaps both)? Tamino’s “Sancho Panza” is the comical bird-catcher, Papageno, who works for the domineering Queen of the Night (Pamina’s mother). Papageno desires just food, drink and a companion, whom – after some disguise and deception – he finds in Papagena (with nearly identical names, they were clearly meant for each other). Along the way, Tamino and Papageno are helped by three ladies in golden masks, handmaidens to the Queen, and by their magical instruments: Tamino possesses the magic flute while Papageno is given some bells with similar supernatural powers.

Given the complexity of this funny little story and the number of characters involved it is a matter of human dexterity worthy of a great illusionist that the entire production was successfully delivered by just four multi-disciplinary performers.  Nathan Bartman gave an infectious, joyful, knockabout performance as Papageno; Jacob Lang, a newcomer to Protein, was suitably noble as Tamino; and Faith Prendergast – still, to me, the epitome of The Little Prince – played Pamina amongst a host of other bit parts, including being the back legs of the monster slain by the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Well, it makes a change being the back end of a monster, rather than a pantomime horse, at this time of year.

This trio of performers were all excellent, but I hope that they will not be offended if I say that the star of the show was the charismatic Donna Lennard who handled a plethora of roles, including both the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, as well as Papagena. Lennard also managed to play all three of the Queen’s wise ladies-in-waiting with the ingenious use of masks attached to her arms. Not only did Lennard move between comedy and serious drama superbly in the twinkling of an eye but she also sang the Queen of the Night’s soprano aria with great emotional clarity. It was a rather beautiful highlight.  

Taking on Mozart must be a potential poisoned chalice for any composer but kudos to the multi-talented Frank Moon for creating a score that wrapped itself sympathetically around key highlights from the opera.

I detected some subtle references to Bergman’s film in the ideas for Silvestrini’s dance theatre, which has been so beautifully designed by Dick Bird: in Bergman’s film Pamina and Papageno are rescued at one point by three young boys in a hot air balloon; here the three “beings” have balloons as heads!  I’m used to seeing Bird’s work on a big stage with a budget to match (as I did later this same day with English National Ballet‘s sumptuous production of Nutcracker). I suspect that he worked with a fraction of the budget for this much smaller-scale production, but on the wonderful “needs must” principle, he has pulled out all the stops with great (and colourful) innovation. The dialogue and singing were explained in surtitles above the stage, but these didn’t always seem to be in synch with the action. I watched this show with an audience full of primary school children and while I am fairly certain that the Bergman and Mozart references would have passed the children by, they are the most honest of all critics and I can confidently say that they loved the whole affair: screaming at the monsters and the overbearing Queen, laughing with Papageno and loving the happy ending. As did I.

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.