Barrie Kosky’s The Magic Flute transports us into its own world of fantasy images. Tamino falls in love with a portrait of Pamina and sets out to rescue her. With threatening dragons, charming pink elephants, dancing constellations, and flying butterfly boys, The Magic Flute is like a magical road movie on the way to true love.

The Magic Flute offers more riddles and questions than answers. It’s not for nothing that this beloved opera’s titular heroine is a musical instrument: in addressing the essentials of human experience, before which both logic and reason must capitulate, only music can ultimately find the right language. Here, the British theatre troupe 1927 and Barrie Kosky use projected animations to retell Mozart’s classic as a living picture book, in a ‘deliciously absurd mix of silent film and cartoon’.