At first glance, their means are modest, even simple. The women wear black briefs, army boots and mangy fur coats; the men, gray suits and conservative wide ties. The main stage element is a large, rectangular platform that can be suspended at different angles from cables attached to the corners.
On either side of this barren setting is a performer whose effects are amplified using loudspeakers and live video projections. On the stage at right, visual artist Blake Habermann, armed primarily with a chalkboard, thrilled the audience with line drawings projected onto the canvas in real time. He suggested the sheer size of Sarastro’s Temple of Wisdom with a stack of leather-bound books. Foley artist Ruth Sullivan parked to the left of the stage with a cabinet of curiosities that she used ingeniously to add sound effects to the action on stage.
“Die Zauberflöte” is, at least in part, a parable of what people are capable of – of what they can achieve when they look within themselves. McBurney’s obvious delight in the mundane performance of the sprawling collection of performers, singers and actors (who followed Papageno waving paper birds) expands on an idea that already exists in the play itself. His faithfulness to the show’s spirit softened the shock of his occasional departures, such as when he split some dialogue in Papageno’s opening aria.
McBurney has also done some rethinking – particularly around the battle of the sexes in the opera, in which enlightened men shake their heads at women’s folly and frivolity. In Mozart and Schikaneder’s song, women lurk in the dark, wild suburbs beyond the gates of Sarastro’s gleaming, orderly shrine. Stages often accept this binary as a true truth of the play; the audience chuckles at jokes written at women’s expense.
It is one of the merits of McBurney’s staging that he broke this dichotomy—I heard no discernible laughter at the book’s misogynistic gags—by satirizing the men’s complacency. The Three Ladies (Alexandria Shiner, Olivia Vote, Tamara Mumford), with their voluptuous harmonies and gleeful indecency – stripping Tamino off his tracksuit and taking a deep, horny whiff of it – were great fun. Sarastro’s temple, with its unflattering tube lighting, was populated by bloodless corporate shills. The Speaker, Tamino’s guide through the opera’s Masonic character tests, turned into a smug, amusingly tight factotum (Harold Wilson).
