THE MAGIC FLUTE
Combining dialogue and song, Mozart’s The Magic Flute is here sung in the original German, with the dialogue (adapted by director David Freeman) spoken in English. Freeman’s ideas are as invigorating as when, 30 years ago, he started his ‘Opera Factories’ in which he rehearsed singers as though they were actors; applying current drama and theatre theories into the process.

For Flute, another theatre practice is introduced, with choreographer Debra Batton and the Legs on the Wall physical theatre company. Legs on the Wall specialise in aerial work, with routines suspending them high above ground.

In the first act, featuring Damien Cooper’s marvelous lighting, with shafts of green, blue or amber light picking through the forest of ropes, the Legs on the Wall troupe hover unseen before twisting and twirling to life as the dragon and other animals so essential to the story. When the

Queen of the Night (Lorina Gore), suspended above the stage, sings her aria, they twirl around her, adding physical gymnastics to her vocal ones.

Most memorable are their mimed, prowling, and snarling lions guarding Sarastro’s (Daniel Sumegi) temple.

Freeman allows the music its own space, and the playing and singing is first rate. The standout is Sara Crane’s Pamina; with her heavenly voice and appearance, Crane constantly illuminates Pamina’s joyous or sorrowful music. Papageno (Andrew Moran) is made into a beer drinking, Paul Hogan-like larrikin, which – however over-the-top the humour may be – he sings with the same geniality that runs through the entire production.

The Arts Centre - State Theatre, until May 8

REALISM

Paul Galloway’s play Realism is set in the Soviet Union in 1939, in the full sway of Stalin’s terror, where the brilliant and successful theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold has been murdered by official decree.  

To celebrate Stalin’s 60th birthday, a group of actors – Meyerhold’s admirers and colleagues – are rehearsing a play about Stalin’s life written in the excruciating ‘official’ style.

Although the merest mention of Meyerhold’s name would land any of them in prison, or worse, they praise him and the other greats of the recent past, including Shostakovich, who composed music for a fireman’s band for a Meyerhold production.

The first act resembles an English farce about an old-fashioned repertory theatre, with Miriam Margolyes and Tony Llewellyn-Jones heading the cast as a sort of Russian version of Margaret Rutherford and John Le Mesurier.  The tension picks up in act two, and concludes with a fantasia in which the epic, revolutionary style of Meyerhold’s theatre is evoked, showing the stage machinery of the new Sumner Theater to stunning effect.

Realism has some effective moments but some less effective half-hours, and is a strange celebration of revolutionary theatre mounted by its bourgeois opposite.

MTC’s Sumner Theatre until May 17.