First performed in 1893, Utopia, Limited was Gilbert and Sullivan’s penultimate opera. Less immediately successful than its predecessors, it divided opinion in its day, and remains an unknown quantity for many. Depicting an imaginary island so obsessed with British values that, under (specifically) English influence, it sets itself up, monarchy and all, as a limited company under the 1862 Companies Act, it satirises the privatisation of public institutions, as well as sideswiping at both the “parliamentary peculiarities” of party politics and a press fixated on royal scandal.
Dramatically it meanders a bit, and the colonialist assumptions that underpin it now render some of it suspect. It also, however, contains some of Sullivan’s loveliest music, and Scottish Opera have taken it into their repertory, albeit with some pruning, as a companion piece to their production of The Gondoliers, first seen in Glasgow and Edinburgh last year, and now on tour in London.
