Mozart from the township

It's 'The Magic Flute', but not as we know it. The Young Vic's David Lan tells how he went all the way to South Africa to find a new take on the classic

I am the artistic director of London's Young Vic theatre, but I am in Athlone, a suburb of Cape Town, in a church hall just off the Klipfontein Road. This is one of the classic apartheid-era urban highways, built wide and straight to get tanks into the townships quickly to quell uprisings. But now is a time of peace, and it's a work of peace that is going on here: rehearsals for a new production of The Magic Flute.

It's a production with a difference. For a start, there's no orchestra. The singers are accompanied only by marimbas, and Mandisi Dyantyis, a slight 25-year-old, is coaching the players – "Let's go, two, three, four" – slipping between speaking Xhosa and English. The director, Mark Dornford-May, in search of a musical director, heard about him at the church that his wife, Pauline Malefane, attends – "we know a guy who knows a guy who knows something about music..." And here Dyantyis is, fresh out of music school, recreating bar by bar the original orchestral parts for eight marimbas, a pair each of soprano, alto, baritone, and bass.

They're at work on the overture. Malefane pounds away stylishly at the bass marimba. She also sings the Queen of the Night, and plays a female Scrooge in, A Christmas Carol, which the Young Vic is also co-producing and bringing to London for Christmas. She sang Carmen for her husband on stage and in his film UCarmen eKhayelitsha (which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival). She has just been named Best Actress at the South African film awards for her part in Son of Man, Dornford-May's second film, based on his hit production The Mysteries which transferred from Wilton's Music Hall to the West End and then to Broadway. She is an extremely well-known South African musician but, before these rehearsals, she could play the marimba no better than any of the others in the 30-strong company.

Recruited from all over South Africa, they are distinguished by two things: musical talent and poverty. Dornford-May auditioned more than 1,500 – and how hard it is to say "no", time after time, when the probable consequence is that their families won't eat. We calculate that three hundred people are dependent on the money that this company earns. Rehearsals end an hour before sunset to allow time to return home to the townships – mostly Khayelitsha, one of the biggest in South Africa. The streets are poorly lit and darkness brings danger.

Dyantyis raises his baton. They play. It's extraordinary. It's Mozart alright, but forget Vienna and sachertorte, and think sunlight dappling the sea.

Simon Rattle, on holiday in Cape Town, heard a performance and was bowled over. He gave us a quote: "Mozart would have been surprised and then delighted." And that's exactly right. It takes a moment to adjust, and then you get it, and you grin. It's gorgeous, touching, slightly rough, slightly jokey, as though the score is being made love to and ever so gently sent up. And then you have to ask yourself: "Why am I in tears?"

They finish to whoops of pleasure. And then Dornford-May's second inspiration. So far they've learnt only the first part of the overture – about two and half of the total six minutes. "Great, guys", he says, "now let's learn the whole thing.

In performance at the Baxter Theatre an odd thing happens. They play the first section of the overture and the audience is rapt. They reach the climax, it sounds as though it's over, and the audience applauds. But, cutting through the applause, they play on. And the audience, thrown off-balance, suddenly understands: this is not a gag or a pastiche. There is no orchestra, no expensive sets or costumes, but it's serious. For now the music gets much more difficult and the musicians need real skill to carry off its elegant, bouncy, heartbreaking delicacy. Can they sustain it? They can! Prolonged applause, and the audience settles down for a remarkable recreation of this supreme work of music theatre.

What is also serious is this company's potential. Some members of the Isango Portobello company, with whom we are co-producing the show, are university-trained, while others have had most of their experience in church choirs. There are pros and cons in both. The trained voices can sing the more demanding parts but, often, with their training, come artificial stage habits which have to go.

Dornford-May's luck has been to find generous backing from Eric Abraham's Portobello Productions, while his genius is to find the perfect context in which all the company can shine.

Our Christmas Carol begins in the shaft of a gold mine where Marley's ghost possesses Tiny Tim – or, in our case, Tiny Thembi – to warn Mrs Scrooge, the new mine-owner, not to allow her wealth to isolate her from her moral community. In our Magic Flute Sarastro is a Mandela-like leader who struggles to reconcile the Queen of the Night to the new realities born of the love between her daughter Pamina and the foreign-born Tamino.

In these productions the performers speak about their own lives but they hold our hands with such a light touch that you feel closely in contact with Dickens's London and Mozart's Masonic fairy tale at the same time.

The well-reported tragedies of South Africa – the health crisis, above all – mask a simpler dilemma. It's false, I believe, to think of talent as bedded into the DNA, as a force that will realise itself come what may. Talent is a relationship – with a parent, a friend, a teacher. Four of the strongest singers in the company owe their careers to Nolufefe Mtshabe, an inspired choir-leader, who spotted them when they were young. But where are all the other teachers, companies, schools, and well-wishers needed to create the hundreds of thousands of relationships to activate the tremendous creativity there could be?

At the Young Vic we have many ways of working with the people who surround us. In shows such as Tobias and the Angel we put our neighbours on our stage alongside a company of leading singers and musicians, each group enhancing each others' pleasure, and that of their audience. Living as we do in a world city, intimately and powerfully connected in one way or another to virtually every other community, we feel that to make shows for London we have to engage, in our own tiny way, with "others" in "other places". Hence, for a start, these two shows with these brilliant South Africans in whose company whom we learn each day something new about what it is to be human.

Back to the church hall in Athlone. They're approaching the end of the opera: "The sun has arisen/ Goodbye to the night/ The whole world is shining/ In glorious light". Then comes the joyous final chorus. I dial the Young Vic and hold out my mobile phone so they can hear: "Listen to this. Just listen to bloody this..."

'A Christmas Carol – Ikrismas Kherol', 20 November to 19 January; 'The Magic Flute – Impempe Yomlingo', 23 November to 19 January (www.youngvic.org; 020-7620 1011)