This is how G&S should be staged: ENO’s HMS Pinafore reviewed

Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had broken America too; at one point there were eight competing productions on Broadway alone. The single most wrongheaded notion that still clings to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas is that they’re somehow low-rent or parochial. They were blockbuster international hits, superbly written, lavishly staged and exported far beyond the Anglosphere. Pinafore was performed in Denmark as Frigate Jutland and in Vienna, Johann Strauss was driven off stage by the runaway success of The Mikado. In the words of the operetta historian Richard Traubner, Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaborations were ‘simply the best musical productions of the Victorian age’.

Cal McCrystal gets that, and his new production for English National Opera goes all out to put on a show. The curtain rises on a life-size quarterdeck and a chorus of dancing sailors doing silly things with mops. So far, so traditional; and the poster-paint colours and retro-chic cut of Takis’s sets and costumes evoke Osbert Lancaster’s designs for Pineapple Poll. But nothing here stands still. Cannons fire, seagulls swoop, and a superannuated chorus member dodders towards an endlessly delayed pratfall. McCrystal’s dizzying staging of ‘Never Mind the Why and Wherefore’ was one of those moments of gleeful, breathless comic invention that had me feeling — as in McCrystal’s Iolanthe in 2018 — that we were finally seeing G&S the way it is meant to be seen: virtuoso musical comedy, bursting with colour and drenched in laughter from a capacity crowd.

In short, it’s a cracking night out, and ENO is running it into December. Take your kids, take your opera-sceptic friends; take your sisters and your cousins and your aunts. Definitely don’t take the kind of bore who can’t stand wisecracking cabin boys (they’ve added one, and in fairness he’s terrific) or poop-deck jokes (McCrystal and Toby Davies are credited with ‘additional material’); who prefers to hear Gilbert’s original dialogue savoured rather than sent up; or who’s liable to grumble that McCrystal can’t hear a quiet, reflective aria without an urge to blow it sky-high with yet more knockabout.