Immensely popular in Mozart’s lifetime, the three-act singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio) presents a distinct problem for contemporary interpreters. Its Orientalist plot concerning the kidnapping of a European noblewoman and her maid by a Turkish pasha paints a portrait of the East, as the musicologist Daniel Sheridan has written, ‘as a sonic and scenic spectacle for Western spectatorship’. Mozart, like many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers, viewed the East as a banquet of exotic tropes to be digested and reconstituted as art – opulent, sensual, enchanting – that made the non-Western world’s otherness palatable to Occidental audiences while furthering the imperialist project in the process.

These days, we are just as likely to pass over – dare I say cancel? – such works as refashion them to better align with contemporary morals and mores. Victorian Opera’s Abduction attempts the latter, editing Mozart’s title to a single word and transplanting the work from a seventeenth-century harem on the Mediterranean coast to a sex-club-cum-cult-mansion in present day Australia. A youthful creative team, led by director Constantine Costi and conductor Chad Kelly, has boldly replaced the original’s dialogue with colloquial Australian English (the songs remain, somewhat jarringly, sung in German) and further undercut Mozart’s Orientalism by casting a white actor (Luke Stoker) as Osmin, the Pasha’s enforcer, who is usually portrayed as a stereotype of Turkish authoritarianism. Their decision – strange at face value – to incorporate a kyrie eleison (‘Lord have mercy’) from another Mozart work, the composer’s Great Mass, seems to serve the same purpose by displacing the pseudo-Turkish stylings of the chorus (costumed here, presumably to signal their sexual subjugation, in red habits and bonnets rather like the handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s novel).

The result is not so much a sanitised version of Mozart’s opera – it certainly retains the original’s libidinousness – as one that would rather neuter than examine its problematically racialised conception. That’s fine as far as it goes, and no doubt one alternative – to present Die Entführung aus dem Serail as Mozart wrote it – would have been too tone deaf for words. Still, one wonders if Costi and Kelly, by simply excising the original’s thorniness, haven’t missed an opportunity to interrogate the politics of colonialism, which, after all, remain far from a spent force in the world.

Perhaps this is too much to expect of a light-hearted and frequently comic work with little of the darkness or relative psychological depth of Mozart’s later operas. Even taken on its own terms, though, Abduction is something of a curate’s egg. While set in twenty-first-century Australia, Nathan Burmeister and Matilda Woodroofe’s costumes and set appear, oddly, to harken back to the 1990s with their double-breasted suits and Eyes Wide Shut-esque blindfolds and seedy opulence. Even the work’s title no longer makes sense. Rather than being abducted by the Pasha, as in the original, in this version Blonde and Konstanze simply walk into the club out of curiosity. Costi and Kelly attempt to flip this, the Pasha claiming that Belmonte and Pedrillo are the kidnappers because they retrieve their fiancés from the club, but I’m not sure that this tongue-in-cheek reversal solves the problem.

Kyle Stegall as Belmonte, Katherine Allen as Blonde and Cleo Lee-McGowan as Konstanze (courtesy of Victorian Opera)

Whatever one makes of either the original or the refreshed libretto, there is no denying the effervescence of Mozart’s score – nor that Abduction contains some of the most demanding roles in the repertoire, Osmin and Konstanze among them. In red chaps and tasselled cowboy hat, Stoker skilfully handles the former’s abrupt octave leaps and sustained low notes (the part was written for Ludwig Fischer, one of the most esteemed basses of his time).

Cleo Lee-McGowan is, despite some fine acting, less impressive, her sharp top notes unflatteringly amplified by the questionable decision to mic the performers. Katherine Allen, in the less challenging role of Blonde, is very good, as are Kyle Stegall and Douglas Kelly, whose Belmonte and Pedrillo are amusingly reimagined as what we used to call Sensitive New Age Guys, their comic banter rife with references to meditation, moisturising, and pro-feminist allyship.

In the non-singing role of the Pasha, Lyndon Watts is wonderfully flamboyant, reminiscent of Dr Frank N. Furter in his taboo-flouting magnetism. Orchestra Victoria is exemplary and, under Kelly’s energetic hand, does justice to the prominence of the work’s score, particularly during Konstanze’s showpiece ‘Martern aller artern’ (Torture of all kinds) with its unusually long, concerto-like introduction.

Mozart was in some sense a liberatory composer, his works often shot through with themes of individual agency, social mobility, and the transgression of class and other boundaries (the unfinished precursor to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Zaide, was about two slaves who fall in love and escape their captor). At the conclusion of the original Abduction, the Pasha releases Belmonte and his friends – a gesture that enrages Osmin but complicates the eighteenth-century, Western European notion of the Turkish as tyrannical and unmerciful. Here, Costi and Kelly go one step further, their finale subverting Belmonte and Pedrillo’s bourgeois morality by having both men swept up, alongside their fiancées, into the Pashas’s licentious world. It is a canny choice, albeit one that arrives too late – and within too cautious a vehicle – to say much about the politics of sex and power.

Abduction (Victorian Opera) was performed at the Palais Theatre from 12–16 August 2025. Performance attended: August 12.