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Perhaps surprisingly for a director as obviously distinguished and experienced (his work at Glyndebourne, Scottish Opera and Covent Garden is the stuff of legend), Cox didn't all that successfully highlight the lightness and slickness, or (conversely) the sheer earthiness of the wit and humour of this very much for-the-people opera.

Those in the audience, who may have resigned themselves to a slowish start (homilies from Sadik) and a lack of real punch in many of the early scenes, on the grounds that this wasn't The Flute and (mostly) wasn't Mozart, were surely a little short-changed. There is a vast amount of wit in this opera from the outset, yet rarely by moves or posture and gesture did Cox get these only moderately good young performers to act and to communicate it. It's a genre that has, like pantomime, to reach out across the footlights.

By contrast Jeremy Gray, directing at Bampton in 2001, did almost effortlessly achieve this -- leading from the front but also engaging in something of a collaborative effort as Schikaneder had himself (Guthrie, the Lubano, was assistant- or co-director on a couple of Bampton's nattier shows; and virtually all of their Philosophers' Stone cast were Bampton regulars (Saberton their Falstaff, Wilde their Ford, and so on).

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