★★☆☆☆
Considering the chances for contemporary gags in a Victorian comic opera featuring fairies, parliament and the judiciary, the director Cal McCrystal shows remarkable restraint in his production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe for English National Opera. A Boris Johnson lookalike cycles by, but “fairy” jokes are remarkably few, and the word Brexit doesn’t exist. Congratulations.
However, in other respects McCrystal — the man who put much of the comic kick into One Man, Two Guvnors and the Paddington films — never knows when to stop. Prancings, arch gesturing, pratfalls galore; multiple aerial flights; a pantomime cow; a puppet dog; dancing scenery shifters; a naughty baring of the Lord Chancellor’s bottom: the circus goes on and on, diverting too much attention from Sullivan’s lovely music