HIGH NOTES AND KNOBBLY KNEES
I am a relative newcomer to Gilbert & Sullivan, having long thought I hated them (heard too many gammony fans in my childhood wrecking the songs). It was Sasha Regan’s jokey all-male productions that lured me to full-on affection for the self-aware satire, surreally silly plots and galumphingly happy tunes .
So I hadn’t known that The Mikado has so many of the most famous ones: A wandering Minstrel I, Three Little Girls, Tit Willow, The Flowers That bloom in the Spring, tra-la! Happy surrprise there. Less surprise, but great pleasure, in yet another of Regan’s amiable framings of the story, in which a gang of lads enact it with – belying their slickly professional skills – a pleasing sense of am-dram gusto and cobbled-up costumes.
For Iolanthe the boys were finding old scores in an attic; here they emerge larking, fifteen of them, from a 1950’s scout ridge tent, while the scoutmaster frowningly passes by with a cricket bat and then takes a role. Thus knobbly knees, boyish gallumphing and the necessary falsetto add the the comedy, while the music – Anto Buckley on piano – is given proper respect and some very fine voices : notably David McKechnie among the male roles and Sam Kipling faultlessly hitting the high bright notes of Miss Plumb.
You always tend to lose a few words in the more rapid falsetto choruses, but most G and S fans know them all anyway, and the solos are clear and lovely. As, naturally, are the ridiculous rhymes: I don’t know why, but there is a particular bracing cheek in the atrociousness of rhyming “Lord High Executioner” with not wanting to be “of your pleasure a diminutioner”. All the satires on officialdom are perennially welcome too.
Ryan Dawson Laight the designer has given them an excellent revolving tent, through the roof of which several characters emerge or vanish as required by the plot. The ladies of the Titipu court giggle with deafening glee and attempt a maypole; a high spot (perhaps especially from my companion fresh from her daughter’s wedding) is the scene where they shave and brutally wax the ‘bride’ while singing her epithalamion. Poor Kitty Shaw arrives by bike, and her sad lament “Alone and yet alive” gets extra pathos by being accompanied by her vigorous use of a bicycle pump. It all suits Wilton’s very well indeed.
box office wiltons.org.uk to 1 July
rating four
theatreCat 