ENO has several times tried to attract another bolt of the Gilbert and Sullivan lightning that brought the company Jonathan Miller’s hit 1986 production of The Mikado. It has stubbornly refused to strike twice, but Mike Leigh’s 2015 staging of The Pirates of Penzance was one of the more serviceable attempts. Leigh’s first go at opera, it was also his first time working fully within the confines of a script; the result – with twittering girls in taffeta and bustles skipping around in front of Alison Chitty’s poster-painted sets before ending up in the arms of lavishly bewhiskered, boisterous yet benign pirates – was a bit more trad and less edgy than the company was probably hoping for. Yet it’s a decent show and it comes up well in this lively revival, directed again by Sarah Tipple and conducted this time by Natalie Murray Beale.
It helps that there are two real G&S stalwarts in the cast. Richard Suart has spent decades honing the timing to land Gilbert’s jokes and the vocal agility to dispense the Major General’s patter song, and it shows, although the accent that goes with his bufty-tufty persona is perhaps a bit overdone in the spoken passages. From the younger generation there is John Savournin, who has directed almost as many G&S operas as he has sung. He delivers his introductory song with refined bravado and, together with Gaynor Keeble’s clearly-sung and characterful Ruth, makes the most of the Blackadder-esque humour in the initial scenario.
Murray Beale gets a nicely poised performance from the orchestra but there are points where she could dial the sound back, usually in the passages when Sullivan slips into serious opera mode. Much of the music for Mabel is a tongue-in-cheek parody of Verdi, and the role’s ideal interpreter would be a notch closer to a Verdi soprano than the light-voiced Isabelle Peters, one of the emerging singers on ENO’s Harewood Artists scheme, but her singing sparkles nonetheless. Singing resonantly in mid-Atlantic Mummerset, the US bass James Creswell is a teddy bear of a Sergeant of Police. The men of the ENO chorus are on top form, their words coming across clearly; the women are less incisive. It is William Morgan, though, who gives the star performance: he’s genuinely funny as Frederic, the naive apprentice pirate who returns in Act 2 as a dashing man of the world before finding himself duty-bound to return to piracy, and sings it all in a soaring tenor that cuts through everything elegantly.
• At the Coliseum, London, until 21 February.
