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The crew of Scottish Opera’s HMS Pinafore.
The crew of Scottish Opera’s HMS Pinafore. Photograph: Alex Aitchison
The crew of Scottish Opera’s HMS Pinafore. Photograph: Alex Aitchison

HMS Pinafore at Edinburgh festival review – joyless, stifled and stilted

This article is more than 8 years old

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Scottish Opera’s reintroduction to the EIF fold made for a dispiriting statement about the organisations’ relative ambitions

It’s hard to figure out what a dismally innocuous Scottish Opera concert performance of HMS Pinafore was doing in the programme of the Edinburgh international festival. Gilbert and Sullivan’s naughty sendup of all things English establishment received smiles and gentle chortles from the Sunday afternoon audience. Of course it did, because its daft music satire is usually at least a bit funny. There was some fine singing from a classy bunch of singers (John Mark Ainsley as Sir Joseph, Andrew Foster-Williams as the Captain, Elizabeth Watts as Josephine, Toby Spence as Ralph, Hilary Summers as Buttercup) who would have been better in Mozart or Handel or Britten.

But a tepid Gilbert and Sullivan read-through in a festival where the remit is to offer the cutting edge of global culture? EIF goes through endless rounds of soul-searching about getting the right balance of Scottish acts for the international audience and foreign acts for the home crowd. This Pinafore was the first inclusion of Scottish Opera after several years of hostile absence: it was a dispiriting statement about a company that once showed off its phenomenal artistic ambition on the EIF stage.

Richard Egarr conducted with a determination to keep things crisp that ultimately stifled a lot of potential silliness. The chorus sounded well schooled and joyless. The concert took the shape of an illustrated lecture, with Tim Brooke-Taylor recounting the plot and history of the piece between scenes. His gags provided some easy laughs, but the stilted format was deadly. Towards the end he reminded us, tellingly, that we had been listening to “a hugely loved operetta”. Somebody had thought to buy sailor hats for the gents. Apart from that, the singers simply stood at microphones (the performance was being recorded for BBC Radio 3). Fair play to them for the gallant spirit they summoned.

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