'If I wasn't on stage, I would absolutely be there every night watching it'

Magical on-stage animation, glorious costumes and a central question about the legitimacy of suffering make WNO's production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide both deep and light as air. Soraya Mafi, who plays Cunégonde, told Jenny White why it is such an extraordinary show

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WITH dreamlike, fantastical staging including animation by French illustrator Grégoire Pont, WNO’s production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide gloriously smashes 18th-century France together with 20th-century postwar America, Broadway with operetta, and romance with satire.

Based on the 1759 novella by French writer and philosopher Voltaire, Candide throws a punch at the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who attempted to explain the problem of evil with his theory of optimism, which posits that all the dreadful things that happen in the world are the result of God's will. Therefore, despite all indications to the contrary, this world must actually be “the best of all possible worlds”.

Through the main characters’ misadventures, Voltaire demonstrates the ludicrousness of the implication that horrors such as pandemics, wars and the suffering of children are “all for the best”.

At the beginning of the operetta, Candide lives in a magnificent castle, where he falls in love with the baron’s daughter, Cunégonde. The match is deemed inappropriate due to Candide’s illegitimacy and he is banished from the castle, shattering the lovers’ world of peace and harmony.

After Candide’s eviction, war breaks out, the castle is destroyed, and he and Cunégonde embark on adventures in which their optimistic philosophy is severely challenged. Outside the sheltered world of the castle, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that “all is for the best”.

Candide’s journey takes him into military service, to Lisbon by boat, where he is arrested and flogged for heresy, and to Paris, where he finds Cunégonde, whom he believed to be dead, trapped in a life of prostitution.