In the last production of Die Zauberflöte at Glyndebourne, directed by Peter Sellars, most of the action took place beneath a Los Angeles freeway. First seen in 1990 it scandalised audiences, and was only revived once. Its successor, directed by Adrian Noble, is located in a fairy-tale world of picture-book animals and brightly coloured backdrops.
It is unchallenging and doubtless destined for a long life in the Glyndebourne repertory, but give me Sellars's preaching and tendentiousness any day rather than Noble's bland, safety-first approach.
This is a staging that reduces Mozart's most enigmatic, multi-layered stage work to its most superficial, pantomime level. It is one thing to ignore the work's masonic symbolism - there's no funny handshake or arcane squiggle - but quite another to by-pass all Zauberflöte's other themes and dualities in favour of basic story telling.
Everything looks handsome enough in Anthony Ward's designs, with colour-coordinated costumes - the Queen of Night, her three ladies and Pamina all in blue, for instance - and some wonderfully imagined giant animals, including the lions accompanying Sarastro.
But there is no sense of natural pace, of a scene growing naturally from the last. Some important moments, like the final defeat of the Queen of Night, are just thrown away. And what little humour there is seems forced. Some of the visual gags - the boys on a six-pedalled bicycle, the bike lifted with balloons for instance - undermine some of the opera's most crucial moments, when all the frivolity should be on hold.
And when the production does try to be serious it ends by being merely risible. The opening of the second act, as Sarastro conducts his sacred ritual in front of a crowd of mumbling adherents, seems simply absurd.
Characters lack detail; a hugely promising young singer like Jonathan Lemalu needs more help than he appears to have got in making Papageno a funny and touching person. Pavol Breslik's elegantly sung Tamino, and Peter Rose's Sarastro, are really ciphers. Lisa Milne's Pamina sings her arias beautifully, but surely should look younger than Cornelia Götz's agile if thin-toned Queen of Night - who is after all her mother?
Vladimir Jurowski's conducting never quite fulfils the promise of an imposing account of the overture, though the playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is always accomplished. Glyndebourne surely sets its sights a bit higher than this.
· In rep until July 16. Box office: 01273 813 813.
