Reviews of the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company at Buxton

Emily Vine (Mabel) and chorus in the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company's

production of The Pirates Of Penzance at Buxton Opera House 2022

The Pirates of Penzance

The Gilbert & Sullivan Festival is back at Buxton – hurrah! A full week of performances at the Opera House there precedes two weeks of continued festival in Harrogate, so there’s the best of both worlds for G&S lovers.

The shows diary is very much the same as it used to be in the days when Buxton had the festival to itself: a different title almost every day, with the festival’s own National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company leading the way (they’re also doing Iolanthe and Utopia Ltd, a relative rarity), plus the pick of the crop of other specialists in the Savoyard repertoire – this week that’s The Gondoliers (Forbear! Theatre), The Mikado (Peak Opera), HMS Pinafore (Opera della Luna), and Charles Court Opera with their own concoction called Express G&S plus Patience.

The Pirates of Penzance was done with the familiar painted sets but re-costumed for director Sarah Helsby Hughes’ fresh take on the piece. She kept all the original script and music, but sent us on a kind of time-warp to the 1930s, where, even if professional pirates still looked the same, Major-General Stanley’s daughters were beach belles in Act One and appeared in fluffy nighties for Act Two, and lovers Mabel and Frederic at one point transformed into Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. There was plenty of dancing by a gifted cast and chorus (choreographer Eleanor Strutt), and just a few knowing tweaks of the familiar lines and situations. I loved it, and the Opera House audience hardly ever stopped laughing.

The music was in the expert hands of John Andrews (of Red Squirrel Opera fame) and the playing by the festival’s own National Festival Orchestra was unimpeachable – a small but well balanced ensemble, under a conductor who knew that getting the words across was the thing that mattered most.

The principals line-up was, as ever before, a mix of new talent and experience. Stalwarts from the old days included Bruce Graham as Sergeant of Police, Louise Crane as Ruth and James Cleverton as the Pirate King – all needing no introduction to the faithful and completely on top of their jobs. Matthew Siveter, as the Major-General (in a kind of Boy Scout uniform, to suit the time-warp), has already made his reputation in the G&S field and proved just how with a superbly rapid “I am the very model …” patter song.

RNCM-trained Aidan Edwards was an extremely strong and clear Samuel, and the three lead daughters, Catrine Kirkman, Kate Lowe and Alexandra Hazard, vamped things up delightfully. And for Frederic and Mabel we had two classy singers: David Webb’s tenor never less than noble and Emily Vine’s soprano hitting the high notes with panache.

 

Iolanthe

Iolanthe was the first of this year’s shows performed by the Gilbert & Sullivan Festival at Buxton and in John Savournin’s production very much follows the formula of tradition-with-tweaks.

Nothing to frighten the horses or the purists (no re-wording of “Oh, Captain Shaw …”, for instance), despite the fact that of all the G&S canon its references today seem furthest removed from the present-day world: we don’t even have a proper Lord Chancellor now, and our House of Lords is far from being made of blue-bloods alone.

But a visit to the festival at Buxton or Harrogate is almost like travelling back to Victorian/Edwardian times anyway, and no one seems to worry about a storyline whose point is all to do with a long-gone legislative and judicial establishment, with a Lord Chancellor in charge of wards of court and membership of the house of peers requiring nothing other than breeding – add to that the romantic Victorian fascination with fairies and you are soon into an innocent fantasy world with its own rules entirely.

There’s just the occasional sharp-eyed reflection on the nonsense (I liked Phyllis’s response to Strephon’s revelation that he was half-fairy and only half-man, as Emily Vine snapped out her line: “Which half?”), and today you can hardly avoid a titter over the line “She’d meet him after dark, inside St James’s Park, and give him one …”, but that’s as far as the double-entendres go.

Merry Holden is the choreographer, and the ever hard-working cast and chorus have moves that require some co-ordination and sometimes recall the much-loved skipping around of the old D’Oyly Carte routines (in “If you go in, you’re sure to win”, for instance – which got its equally traditional encore). The music was again in the expert hands of John Andrews, with the National Festival Orchestra providing flexible and sympathetic accompaniments.

And stand-outs among the principals, for me, were Matthew Palmer (Strephon), an excellent young tenor still at the outset of what should be a very successful career, and Meriel Cunningham (Iolanthe), who has a rich mezzo-soprano tone and real clarity. Matthew Kellett enjoys rattling off the patter as the Lord Chancellor; Matthew Siveter has his spot of glory as Private Willis; Emily Vine is a winsome Phyllis and Amy J Payne an imperious Queen of the Fairies; and Ben McAteer and Hal Cazalet enjoy prancing their way through as Earls Mountararat and Tolloller.

Utopia Limited

One of the orchestra members was using the audience loos (which are few anyway) before the show at Buxton on Friday night, so I asked him whether they didn’t provide enough of them backstage.

“Yes,” he said, “but they’re all full of the turns, warming up their voices.”

A tangential illustration of one facet of producing Gilbert & Sullivan’s next-to-last operetta, Utopia Ltd – there are an awful lot of “turns”, i.e. people in the cast.  That’s probably one reason why it’s not done very often.

So credit where it’s due: the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival, this year beginning at Buxton and moving on to Harrogate, did us all a good turn by offering the first fully staged professional revival of it (apart from the D’Oyly Carte’s one attempt) back in 2011, and here it is again.

Jeff Clarke, of Opera della Luna fame, is the director, with Jenny Arnold his inventive choreographer, and John Andrews conducts the G&S Festival’s own National Symphony Orchestra.

The piece may, when written in the early 1890s, have been a bit derivative of past Gilbert-Sullivan glories: Gilbert’s plot is about a distant island that decides to improve itself by adopting all the benefits of Victorian English society – the rulers (and some members) of the Army and Navy, a lawyer, a county councillor, a Lord Chamberlain, and a crafty businessman on the make, and of course there’s much flouncing around in posh costumes and drinking of cups of tea. Cue jokes at the expense of all of that, and there are references in the script (and in the score for the latter of them) to both The Mikado and HMS Pinafore.

Clarke has removed the locale from the “luxuriant and tropical landscape” of the original book to a generally Middle Eastern one, with palms and porticoes. He leaves it to the expertise of performers such as Robert Gildon and Giles Davies (as the Wise Men of pre-reform Utopian society) and Ben McAteer to get the story over in Act One, which they do with excellent diction, and there is a delightful character study from Monica McGhee (as Princess Zara, the daughter of the kingdom who returns from Girton College, Cambridge, to share all she’s learned of enlightened society) – she’s absorbed the Queen’s English so much as to sound like the Queen herself.

Meriel Cunningham and Rachel Speirs (the latter stepping up from chorus duties to take the role on 5 August) portray her sisters, the young princesses Nekaya and Kalyba as feisty young ladies with their own ideas … an aspect of Gilbert’s young heroines that’s increasingly drawn on these days.

Where Clarke really gets into his stride is the early part of Act Two, with nice touches from lighting designer Matt Cater for a night-time setting, and Anthony Flaum, as Captain Fitzbattleaxe of the First Life Guards (who we soon learn is Princess Zara’s love interest as well as security detail), is very funny as the romantic tenor singer who’s never quite able to deliver when he’s not in the mood. That’s soon followed by a song for the British gentlemen who represent the “Flowers of Progress” – complete with visual props, a mock encore and present-day references to the NHS and fuel prices in its final verse.

Of these Britishers I admired Tim Walton’s highly theatrical Lord Chamberlain and the cockney wide-boy given by Paul Featherstone as businessman Mr Goldbury, and Katharine Taylor-Jones also impressed as The Lady Sophy – the nearest Utopia Ltd gets to an elderly bossy-woman role. Cameron Mitchell, Aidan Edwards, Stephen Godward and Ciarán Walker all make strong contributions.