William Kentridge’s production of Die Zauberflöte was first seen at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2005. Since then it has been staged in a number of theatres – including one in Kentridge’s native South Africa – before reaching La Scala last year. It is very much ‘producer’s opera’ and it will annoy some people. I found it fascinating, despite having reservations on both fronts, musical and philosophical.

Although Kentridge is dismissive of Freemasonry, he does see the opera – how could he not? – as a conflict between light and darkness. But in an interview he describes his production as ‘a kind of a distant polemic against Sarastro and against the notion of the pure light of reason’, adding that ‘reason comes not from pure clarity but from somehow muddling in the space between darkness and light’. He takes as his metaphor the cinema, where ‘blinding light means there is no more film in the projector’; and there is a box camera on the stage, through which the characters peer from time to time.

The metaphor becomes reality in Kentridge’s brilliant use of video projections, including the serpent pursuing Tamino, the three temples, and various geometrical symbols. These are animated drawings; but during Sarastro’s ‘O Isis und Osiris’ there is old film of what looks like a couple of Boers with rifles. What’s all that about? Well, during ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’ those huntsmen are seen shooting a rhinoceros, as Pamina looks on in horror; and when in the Act 1 Finale Tamino played his flute, it was a cartoon rhino that was shown cavorting. Innocent nature versus wicked mankind, I suppose, and a heavy-handed example of Kentridge’s anti-Sarastro polemic. For the Queen of the Night he recreates the well-known starry sky that Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed for Berlin in 1815.

The video projections are in black and white but there’s plenty of colour in the costumes: a safari suit for Tamino, a brown frock coat for Papageno, Pamina in a red dress, Sarastro and his entourage – especially the Speaker – in natty floral waistcoats. Monostatos is a late-19th-century Ottoman, complete with fez and waxed moustache.

I almost forgot the singers. Excellent Queen and Pamina; the men less so, except for Papageno. Lively musical direction, incorporating René Jacobs’s superfluous keyboard interjections. Don’t miss this visually enchanting and thought-provoking treat.