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Specific colouring possibly played more of a role in this production, and in Ruthven Hall's appealing designs, than I succeeded in spotting first time round. One was aware, latterly, of a glowing presence of greens (headlined by the elfin child-dwarves, and seen also in the decorative plants and other items around the stage). Reds surfaced several times, notably in the hellish grotto formed by the well used, rectangular centre-stage hatch, and in one semi-diabolic sequence that saw the chorus all togged out in bright scarlet. Possibly creams and blues were featuring elsewhere to indicate something noble, deserving of respect or simply unthreatening and affable: ie on the right side. What all this shows is that the many pleasing visual aspects of Cox's production were by no means limited to the costumes. His chorus blocking, on two or three occasions, was first-rate, bespeaking the expert director and true professional.

Sadly Eutifronte's final curse -- a big moment, surely ('O Höll und Tod! Der Bube lebt!' ('O bloody hell! The baby's not dead!) -- rather lacked dramatic force (though worked, up to a point, as comedy); and his subsequent outbursts (admittedly everything is wrapped up by Schikaneder's fast-shifting libretto at rather too pantomime-like and unrealistic a pace) were on the whole bathetic: if the baddie doesn't get a proper come-uppance, some of the moral point is lost. (Alternatively, it needs to be played all-out for comic effect. This, dully camped up, was neither.) More engaging was the airborne return of the messenger-bird. Just perfect -- Cox launched us here straight into the cheerful world of Papageno and the three boys of The Flute -- or of Carl Zeller's Der Vogelhändler.

The culminating magical moment of Cox's Garsington production was saved for the last moving tableau: the passing of the 'stone', with its magic properties of life itself, up from servants to humans to celestial father to the messenger of the Gods, at the apex of a cheerfully symbolic pyramid. Less than perfectly carried off on the first night, but a moment of real visual magic (compare Garsington's wonderful final tableau to Strauss's 1995 Daphne) to round off a treat of an evening.

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