AN ODD thing about David McVicar’s productions is the way they improve with time. When this show first appeared it was too po-faced by half, full of regard for the pomposities of the piece but hardly at ease with its lightness, enchantment and childish simplicity.

Well, now the staging has grown a heart and a sense of wonder and comes close to truly discovering both the gravity and play of the piece. How much of this is due to Lee Blakeley, who took charge of this revival, is hard to say, but the pattern is interesting.

What has happened is that Papageno, pricelessly played and sung by Simon Keenlyside as a melancholy clown, has become the absolute centre of the conception rather than some charming sideshow. It is his instincts — nuanced and humanistic without becoming self-conscious — that everything else is measured against; when he rolls into a desolate ball as Tamino rejects Pamina, and then spits out his simple disgust with Sarastro’s “becoming a man” flatulence, you can’t help agreeing with him. Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen is full of light and shade and mood swings, opening up new depths. Papagena (Gail Pearson) breezes in from the future in leather and leopard-print, bringing real joy and uplift as well as a mobile-bedful of kiddies: Papageno bounces about with restored rubbery energy to cap an amazing, moving performance.

The show’s original strength, a grave and stately beauty highlit by some exceptionally lovely 18th-century designs by John Macfarlane, brilliantly lit by Paule Constable, is still there, Sarastro’s temple full of shifting shadows and mystery. McVicar’s doubledistancing device of presenting the thing as if in an 18th-century theatre (a foot-operated bird for Papageno, Chinese-style dragon worked by actors) risks being arch but isn’t because the simple things — the little morals, Papageno and Pamina coming to sit over the pit to sing Bei Männern — work so honestly.

And it should get better. First-night music was amazingly inconsistent, Charles Mackerras’s plodding conducting at odds with his programme-note on Mozart’s tempi (until a double-quick Ach, ich fühl’s, and a wonderfully scurrying accompaniment to Monostatos), a workmanlike Tamino from Will Hartmann, Jan-Hendrik Rootering’s floundering Sarastro, and a Queen of the Night (Anna-Kristiina Kaappola) who started tight, sour and unfocused before hitting her stride. But Rebecca Evans’s beautifully sculpted phrases and womanly warmth as Pamina were breathtaking, the boys were confident and robust, and John Graham-Hall was a great panto-villain Monostatos straight out of Rocky Horror with his gang of time-warping munchkins. At last this is a Flute to lift the heart.

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