(seen at the performance on 4th February 2025)
Let’s leave aside the surreal encounter between the monkey and the real King (not the Pirate one) at this performance. Oh, all right. So, the monkey likes the front corner stalls as you can use a corridor from the foyer - past the boxes entrance doors - to get to them. Avoids needing to push up the main aisle.
Come the interval, the monkey went to use the corridor to get to the foyer and facilities... It was halted and informed that a VIP needed to get to the VIP room off the corridor first. The King is shorter than one might expect, but immaculately turned out for a personal and private visit. Either way, monkey and King were just metres from each other. Odd on a quiet Tuesday night.
Anyway, so this is the ENO take on the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, which ignores all rules of law and logic, twisting it to suit their purposes.
Frederic (William Morgan) was apprenticed to a pirate instead of a pilot by slightly deaf maid Ruth (Gaynor Keeble). Turning 21, he gets out of the contract. Until it turns out he was born in a leap year, so isn’t 21 until 1940. Nobody points out that a 5-and-a-bit-year-old can't enter into a legal contract anyway. Lucky, as it would banjax the whole thing.
Still, he gets to discover women, and finds his love Mabel (Isabella Peters), her sisters and father, Major General Stanley (Richard Suart).
First thing to note is that Alison Chitty’s set is really remarkably ugly. A circular porthole or spyglass image, with a rectangle poking through for the ship, and a staircase for the house. Bold 70s children’s TV colours and angles, and cold as ice instead of bright Cornish images.
The costumes are not much better – think up-market AmDram rentals. Only the front-cloth projection is quite fun – seagull and owl.
As you would expect of a dedicated opera company, the approach is also serious. Director Mike Leigh (yes, that Mike Leigh) seems hampered by the fact opera companies cannot do spoken word and dance that well.
Choreographer Francesca Jaynes keeps it simple, but the movement is as leaden as much of the comedy delivery. No timing and little rhythm.
The voices are, of course, immaculate, though. We do feel for the Sergeant of Police (James Creswell) on delightfully corpulent form bemoaning his unhappy lot.
Suart delivers his key “Very Model” number with accuracy (helpful programme notes explaining some of the lyric – "animaliculous" are microscopic lifeforms, who knew? he did – but distracting movements. Typical of the whole evening.
It is quite hard to warm to any of them. John Savournin is hardly threatening as the Pirate King, less swash than expected. It is a little surprising Morgan is ever worried about him, to be honest.
Keeble, also Bethan Langford and Anna Elizabeth Cooper as Edith and Kate respectively have delicious voices to deliver their key moments, but again our sympathies are barely aroused.
It remains one of the enduring classics of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, but this production does rather highlight the fact that between the huge songs we all know (and which many audience members were humming along to under their breath), there are long periods of generic G&S which the show does little to lift in its pace.
A good chance to hear the score well sung, but not the most exciting and transporting version the monkey has seen.
3 stars.
Photo credit: Theatremonkey.com. All rights reserved.