"A policeman's lot is not an happy one," laments the Sergeant, but by the end everyone's happy - in the story and the audience. Even the hardest opera snobs cease whining about microphones levelling all singers to average and are softened by the colour and charm of Stuart Maunder's 2006 production of this most famous Gilbert and Sullivan. Their novice opposites, whose only experience of opera is the Phantom, love it too. Children particularly adore Anthony Warlow as the Pirate King, who looks like Johnny Depp in Jack Sparrow fancy dress.
G&S were the Monty Python of Queen Victoria's time, churning out wacky satires of established ways and the establishment, while remaining very, very British. Surprisingly, their appeal has not much faded. Even the awful puns, such as an extended misunderstanding between the words ‘often' and ‘orphan', are kept amusing by fine direction and acting. Such verbal gadgetry was a staple of Victorian musical comedy, and this opera is a Heath Robinson contraption precisely set to memorable tunes. The plot is based on three premises as preposterously shaky as the structural support in a surrealist painting: that the hearing-impaired nursemaid Ruth (Suzanne Johnston) mistakes her instructions to apprentice the dashing young hero Frederic (Matthew Robinson) to a pilot; that he obediently serves his term among pirates until his 18th birthday and then turns against them; but when they point out to him that because he was born on 29 February he concedes to remain the 'Slave of Duty' for leap years to come.
Unusually for opera, good acting all round masks the silly plot, most prominently by Peter Carroll as the modern Major-General, who soars through both the caricature part and its notoriously difficult patter song, taken so fast by conductor Andrew Greene that even the IBM-sponsored surtitles surrender and display the error message "Too much information: just watch the stage." Amen. Jason Catlett
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