The Pirates of Penzance, ENO, review: 'jolly good - but a crowd-puller?'

Although Mike Leigh has made it clear that his operatic debut is a fun outing rather than a serious bid to launch himself in the field (he’s turning back to the movies for a project focused on the Peterloo massacre), the popular success of his staging of The Pirates of Penzance matters a great deal to ENO.

Its beleaguered management needs to sell nearly 40,000 seats for its first run of 16 performances; beyond that, the show needs to re-connect the company to a swathe of the public that has either drifted away to HD broadcasts or been alienated by post-modernist conceptual productions. Can a new-look G&S classic do the trick?

It’s certainly a jolly good show, directed and performed with meticulous care, but for three reasons which I’ll come to, I doubt that it will prove a perennial crowd-puller to match ENO’s previous G&S smash hit, Jonathan Miller’s version of The Mikado.

Leigh has played it straight. As anyone who has seen his wonderful film Topsy-Turvy will know, he has a deep respect and affection for these operettas, and he’s not out to subvert or disparage them. The action is traditionally interpreted and as crisply paced as Gilbert himself would have wished. The costumes are Victorian period, nobody takes their trousers off, and the libretto is honoured without superfluous vulgarities or additions. No subtext is mined, because there is none.

^{Joshua Bloom as the Pirate King in Mike Leigh's ENO production of The Pirates of Penzance (Photo: Alastair Muir)}

Using the pit-sized orchestra that Sullivan would have wanted, David Parry conducts the score beautifully - too beautifully at times, I thought, as the Mendelssohnian refinement teetered on the precious. More oomph, please.

The cast is just about exemplary. Joshua Bloom makes a nicely swaggering big-baby of a Pirate King and Rebecca de Pont Davies is ghoulishly sinister as the piratical maid-of-all-work Ruth. Claudia Boyle’s forthright Mabel delivers the coloratura of ‘Poor Wandering one’ with insouciant ease, and Soraya Mafi is enchanting as her kid sister Edith. That elegant and versatile tenor Robert Murray does everything required of him as Frederic.

I was slightly disappointed by Andrew Shore’s Major-General, who failed to raise the comic temperature in his patter song, but pleasantly surprised by Jonathan Lemalu’s Mummerset Sergeant of Police - his imperturbably lugubrious rendering of “When a felon’s not engaged” was my personal highlight of the evening. Leigh has also motivated the chorus to give of their best - vivid characterisations all round.

^{Joshua Bloom, Andrew Shore and Rebecca de Pont Davies as Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance (Photo: Alastair Muir)}

My reservations are these. Alison Chitty’s austere setting is framed by a blank blue panel into which a large circular hole has been cut: apart from some ship’s rigging, a tombstone cross and an outsize medallion of Queen Victoria, it contains virtually nothing representational, and the impression of an minimalist Ikea aesthetic seems inappropriate to the cluttered Victorian ethos that informs the piece.

Secondly, the Coliseum auditorium is just too cavernous for the modest scale of this work, and given Parry’s dainty conducting and everyone’s first-night best behavior, the fun didn’t project with enough raw gusto, even to the best seat in which I was privileged to be sitting. Joseph Papp’s famous Drury Lane production of the Eighties seized the thing by the scruff of the neck and knocked it into a wham-bam Broadway musical. Here, unmiked, it seems a tad too respectful and genteel to provoke whoops of joy.

The third problem is the piece itself. Without a bit of help, it’s not one of G & S’s best. There’s no showstopper, no great finale, no comic mayhem. In this day and age, Gilbert’s relentless sexism is tiresome if not offensive, and much of the word-play merely pedantic. I wish they’d plumped for Iolanthe instead.

And so, in Gilbert’s own immortal phrase, my verdict is: modified rapture.

Until July 4. Tickets: 020 7845 9300: eno.org

Will be screened live to cinemas across the UK on May 19, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on June 29