“I realise this is the suicide interview,” says Simon Callow. He is submitting with good grace to the inevitability that whatever he says about his production of The Magic Flute for Holland Park Opera will be measured against his long-held conviction that he alone knows how to stage this Mozart opera.

It was a conviction which, he tells me, evaporated entirely when he began working on the piece. “I now unequivocally withdraw that belief. The Magic Flute is fathomlessly difficult, but it’s exactly as it should be because this kind of parable piece should be represented in every possible different way. The reason I thought I could do it better than anyone else is on the rather spurious grounds that in my time I had been both Mozart and Schikaneder. I am now punished for that thought.”