★★★★☆
Only the resolutely curmudgeonly, and perhaps a few Gilbert and Sullivan purists, will fail to leave English National Opera’s sparkling production of HMS Pinafore without a smile on their face. As someone who is occasionally in both categories, even I found myself chuckling along with Cal McCrystal’s endlessly mischievous staging.
Just as well it’s fun because ENO has scheduled loads of performances. Like Sir Joseph Porter in Gilbert’s blissfully silly story of jolly tars and mixed-up babes, ENO’s punters had better take along their sisters and their cousins and their aunts if they are going to fill the Coliseum 19 times before Christmas.
Sullivan’s light-fingered music, deftly conducted by Chris Hopkins, emerges unscathed from the McCrystal treatment. Gilbert’s dialogue does not. I’m not sure if that sexually prim Victorian would have approved of insertions such as “Will you take me up the poop deck?” And he would have been downright baffled by references to levelling up, Wimpy burgers and Toblerones, although he probably would have enjoyed an effigy of our prime minister lampooned on a wonky zip wire.
The truth, however, is that untampered Gilbert has sounded stilted for at least half a century, and the new dialogue (by McCrystal and Toby Davies) gets more laughs than Gilbert’s original lines. What gets most laughs, however, is McCrystal’s subversive visual humour, which ranges from an allusion to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to increasingly suggestive anagrams of the ship’s name — each new one revealed as takis’s reassuringly ship-shaped set swirls around.
Lizzi Gee’s choreography is joyous, plentiful and admirably performed too, especially because it’s mostly not hired hoofers doing the tapping and hornpipes, but the vivacious ENO chorus and multi-talented principals such as John Savournin (a brilliant John Cleese-like turn as Captain Corcoran), Marcus Farnsworth (superbly hearty as the Boatswain) and the astonishing nine-year-old Rufus Bateman as an urchin “midshipmite” (a character invented by McCrystal) who pops up everywhere.
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Elgar Llŷr Thomas and Alexandra Oomens ooze charm and sweet lyricism as the secret lovers Ralph and Josephine. Hilary Summers is a terrific Little Buttercup, with an accent reeking of fish and pasties, and Henry Waddington revels in presenting Dick Deadeye as a grotesque malcontent whose halitosis sends people reeling.
And the star turn? As Porter, the completely unqualified First Lord of the Admiralty, the comedian Les Dennis is self-mocking and often very funny, but don’t expect him to deliver more than a vague approximation to Sullivan’s notes. I just wish that, if he’s going to speak his songs, he speaks them in time with the orchestra.
To December 11; eno.org
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