Welsh National Opera’s production of Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE has been given a surrealistic dressing. It begins with Tamino being pursued by a giant Dali-esque lobster. And his travails to win the right to love the Queen of the Night’s daughter Pamina are played out in a Magritte-like tableau of doors set into walls painted to look like sky. The stage is raised to allow some extraordinary scenes later when the Sorastro ‘brotherhood’ is visible only by dint of their heads protruding up through the elevated boards wearing bright orange Magritte-inspired bowler hats.

“. . . The two female leads circle and play off each other throughout, unknowingly becoming crucial influences on each other while an unlikely friendship brews between them. . . The staging of the action was wonderfully realised with a mesmerising set that morphed from twirling cog wheels to portcullis bars; time pieces gave way to an extraordinary mechanised Wizard; changing skyscapes dissolved to the green green shininess of Oz . . .”

“The directors have learned that fundamental lesson of theatre (known indeed by striptease artists) that to suggest is often more powerful than to show. Morris’s other revival, Swallows and Amazons, bears this out. He has become a master of imaginative stagecraft and like Orson Welles, who brought Moby Dick to the London stage some half century ago, he relishes making the seemingly impossible possible. Total war calls for total theatre and in this production the two are well matched. “