The Magic Flute review – WNO’s hectic new version is a lightsaber too far

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Daisy Evans’ psychedelic and frantic modern reworking dodges the original’s problems, but loses much of Mozart’s magic and energy in the process – and the flute itself

Mozart and Schikaneder’s mix of pantomime and Masonry (for some, one and the same) and its triumph of good over evil counts as the most popular of all operas, but today The Magic Flute has also become one of the most problematic. In Welsh National Opera’s new staging, director Daisy Evans’s way around its acknowledged racism and misogyny is to have rewritten the libretto, creating a “modern reworking”, a generally funked-up psychedelia of colour, glowing globes and LED strip batons.

Evans’s backstory comes with the overture, making young Pamina and Tamino childhood friends, abruptly separated when Pamina is spirited away from her manic mother, Queen of the Night, by Sarastro, King of the Day. In his kingdom, Monostatos, the predatory blackamoor, becomes a camp science teacher, whose lessons Pamina finds boring. The merest nod to Masonic ritual has one of Sarastro’s sect – here called Geeks, and dressed in yellow-shorted playsuits – with a single leg rolled up.