ajhlovestheatre

THE MIKADO

Libretto by W S Gilbert

Music by Arthur Sullivan

Directed by Sasha Regan

Wilton’s Music Hall, London – until 1 July 2023, then touring

https://wiltons.org.uk/whatson/796-sasha-regan-s-all-male-the-mikado

Sasha Regan’s inventive all-male versions of Gilbert and Sullivan are wildly popular and this 1950s schoolboys take on perhaps the most beloved but, to modern eyes, problematic of the G&S canon of operettas successfully continues the tradition. The Mikado presents a challenge these days because, although Gilbert’s script was a witty “topsy-turvy” comment on English Victorian politics, it was created at a time when faux japonaiserie was all the rage and it was perfectly acceptable to give characters made-up ‘comedy’ Japanese names like Pish-Tush, Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah, have them don yellowface, and set them loose in a town with an fabricated oriental name (Titipu).

Jonathan Miller’s long-standing English National Opera production sidestepped the cultural pitfalls by setting the whole thing in the whitewashed lobby of a plush 1920s English hotel, and now Regan presents it as a storytelling diversion for a bunch of 1950s schoolboys on a forest camping trip. Ryan Dawson Laight’s set consists mainly of a spinning tent, a campfire and trees climbing into the flies; to avoid offence, all the characters names have been anglicised but into something similar sounding so as not to mess with Gilbert’s intricate rhymes. So “wand’ring minstrel” Nanki-Poo becomes Bertie Hugh, the “three little maids from school” Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo are now, respectively, Violet Plumb, Bluebell Tring and Hebe Flo, the vengeful gorgon Katisha is now Kitty Shaw, and so on. There’s still a Mikado (another word for Japanese Emperor) which doesn’t make much sense, but then again, it’s pretty much impossible to think of an English equivalent.

Actually, the Mikado is one of the highlights of the whole show. In a performance that would make the late Eric Morecambe proud, a wonderfully deadpan Lewis Kennedy presents him as a clumsy, Geordie-accented nutter with milk bottle-bottom glasses, wildly eccentric head gear and the alarming habit of addressing everyone through a loudhailer even when they are but centimetres away. As Kitty Shaw, the starched but bloodthirsty bicycle-riding sidekick who loves his errant son Bertie Hugh, Christopher Hewitt is almost as funny, envisioning her as a sort of nightmarish amalgam of Margaret Rutherford and The Wizard of Oz’s Miss Gulch. Despite the laughs, Hewitt gives the whole evening what little emotional anchor it has.

Another highlight is David McKechnie’s Lord High Executioner, Mr Cocoa, urgently hell bent on finding a victim so as to avoid decapitation himself. McKechnie plays him with a sweaty desperation and mounting exasperation that gets funnier and funnier, not least because the actor never loses sight of the absolute serious truth at the core of successful comedy.

Elsewhere it’s a bit of a muggers paradise, with each of the performers busily pitching his bit of comedy business directly at the audience. Some of it is hilarious but I personally reached my threshold of tolerance for gurning adults pretending to be children and strapping young men trying to out-fey each other as archly simpering schoolgirls, about halfway through the first half. Many will, I’m sure, feel differently, but in non binary 2023, this performance style feels a little passé. That said, nobody is likely to go and see a Victorian operetta performed in a beautiful old music hall expecting cutting edge innovation, and the audience went wild for it.

There are some gloriously inventive touches in Regan’s witty direction, and in Adam Haigh’s choreography, which does wonders in a limited space. Alistair Lindsay’s lighting is gorgeously evocative. MD Anto Buckley does a heroic, accomplished job of playing Sullivan’s intricate, endlessly tuneful score. The choral singing frequently thrills the blood. Just occasionally the higher notes in the solos, particularly female roles, sound a little pinched, but that could be a combination of vocal fatigue and the fact we are in the midst of allergies season, although Sam Kipling’s amusingly disingenuous Miss Plumb really nails Yum-Yum’s tricky, but liltingly lovely, “The Sun Whose Rays…” aria, a number which can be a challenge to even a conventional soprano.

Overall, this isn’t really my cup of tea, and I felt it got better and better as it went along. The second act improves considerably on the first, largely, for me, because it featured the title character and the unlikely but rather glorious romance between Kitty Shaw and Mr Cocoa. The whole thing brought a packed house to its feet, and the infectious joy rolling from the stage into the audience proves pretty disarming. Over what could be a challenging summer, this is set to make a lot of people very happy, and it’s hard not to come away with a bit of a rosy glow.