Tom Erik Lie as Pagageno and Kim-Lilian Strebel as Panima in The Magic Flute (photograph by Tony Lewis)

The 1927 company, which has presented its work in Australia before – the folkloric tale Golem featured at Sydney Theatre Company in 2016 and at Adelaide Festival the following year – initially declined Kosky’s offer to work on The Magic Flute. According to Kosky, Andrade and Barritt were reluctant partly because neither of them had ever been to an opera before. As opera novices, their fresh eyes add value to one of the most frequently performed Mozart works, which paved the way for a movement towards more operas in German in the nineteenth century, following a long era of composers writing in Italian or French.

Their work with Kosky is a pure joy to watch, as Papageno becomes a Buster Keaton figure in gold hat and tie. Pamina, in a black frock with white collar, sports a bob in the style of Louise Brooks in Austrian director G. W. Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box. Their nemesis, Monastatos, is a creepy, white-faced Nosferatu plucked from his eponymous 1922 silent German horror movie. Characters ingeniously interact with the art projected behind and over their bodies: a cigarette smoked by one of the three ladies who serve Pamina’s mother, the Queen of the Night, for instance, bursts animated hearts; the Queen herself presents as only a head on a long-legged cartoon spider that fills the screen.

Kim-Lilian Strebel as Panima and Emil Ławecki as Monostatos in The Magic Flute (photograph by Tony Lewis)

The animation is a constant on stage; the performers not always so. The singing in this production, which had its Australian première at the Perth Festival in February before moving to Adelaide Festival in March, is often rendered secondary to the spectacle, but that is sometimes a good thing. After all, our hero, the bird-catcher Papageno, was originally written for the opera’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, to cater for Schikaneder’s less than virtuosic range. The challenge here is to make Papageno lovelorn without making him seem pathetic. The role is filled here in evening performances by the Norwegian baritone Tom Erik Lie, a habitué of the Komische Oper, who succeeds in making this Keatonesque creation loveable.

British soprano Kim-Lilian Strebel presents a memorable, feisty Lulu-style figure as Pamina, whose power over men helps her surmount the usual misogyny directed against women in opera, while American tenor Aaron Blake gives the prince Tamino a powerful voice, even though his character is not quite so delineated here. Notwithstanding a potential audience outbreak of arachnophobia, Polish soprano Aleksandra Olczyk in spider form hits the heights of the Queen of the Night’s aria Der Hölle Rache (Hell’s revenge cooks in my heart).

Aleksandra Olczyk as Queen of the Night and Kim-Lilian Strebel as Panima in The Magic Flute (photograph by Tony Lewis)

The characters’ lines that in other productions would be spoken between Mozart’s majestic music are instead converted into captions accompanied by a honky-tonk keyboard. Existential angst dogs the singers’ journeys as the performers dip and duck and march and run and play through a colour palette that segues from black and white to reds to blues to golds. The captions include: Who am I? Where am I? Am I dreaming?

Throughout the work, the text on screen as an alternative to the spoken word lends Mozart and Schikaneder’s enigmatic tale a greater clarity than in more traditional presentations of the opera; characters are crisply introduced and the marvellous mystery of the flute and compounded misunderstandings of individual agendas are given new precision after two centuries of many by-the-book renderings of the work. As the second of two acts takes our questing heroes through trials of silence, temptation, and finally fire and water, the animated sequences alternate between hilarious and trippy, with occasionally South Park-levels of disturbing surrealism, particularly with the prospect of Papageno’s spookily multiplying offspring.

Kosky, whose wonderfully creative take on Shostakovich’s absurdist The Nose was seen at Sydney Opera House in 2018 after his sumptuous take on Handel’s oratorio Saul headlined the Adelaide Festival the previous year, has said it is ‘very unlikely’ he would ever run an arts company in Australia, ‘unless the Australia Council tripled its budget’. That is a shame for our sakes as audience members, though it is to be hoped we see more of his works here soon.

The Magic Flute was performed by the Komische Oper Berlin at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Perth for the Perth Festival in late February 2019, and then at the Festival Centre, Adelaide for the Adelaide Festival in early March 2019. Performance attended: March 1.

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