The Magic Flute

Half Moon Theatre, Cork

The Arts Council geared up to create a national opera company based in Wexford. The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Martin Cullen, trumped that with a national company based in Dublin that would leave the Wexford Festival as an independent entity.

But all the to-ing and fro-ing about opera has tended to obscure the fact that Opera 2005, the company proudly launched as part of Cork's year as European capital of culture, last year suffered the worst of fates, the total loss of Arts Council funding. Opera 2005 may be down, but it's not completely out. And to prove it, a new production of Mozart's Magic Flute, directed by John O'Brien and aimed at children of primary school age, in Cork city and county.

It’s a cut-down version that runs for around an hour, has a cast of puppets as well as singers (making it easy for the singers to double up their roles by changing the puppets they manipulate), and, in an arrangement by O’Brien himself, reduces the orchestra to just two players, a hard-working pianist (the always musicianly Ciara Moroney) and a multi-tasking partner who moves from flute to synthesizer to percussion (Evelyn Grant).

The strengths of the production are musical. Admittedly, there were a few lapses from the singers in the performance I heard at noon. But Nyle Wolfe was always engaging as the bird-catcher Papageno, and he also engaged more fully with the characterisation of his puppet than anyone else. Mary Hegarty made an attractive Pamina, and Richard Wiegold was an imposing Sarastro. As the baddie, Monostatos was granted the luxury of a separate puppeteer (Daragh Bradshaw), but I couldn’t discern any extra chills as a result.

The actual puppets – full-size heads on sticks, with trailing costumes with a single glove attached to open up the world of gesture – seemed to me to be over-decorated (the glitter and sequins created real difficulties for lighting designer Paul Denby) and underutilised by most of the singers.

Some of the quick repartee and updated dialogue (the risks of swine flu vs bird flu for Papageno) hit the spot with the young audience. But I was surprised that although the speech was kept lively, the arias were sung in a translation that jarred with an abundance of rusty phrases.