Queen Victoria would almost certainly not have been amused by her loyal citizens but we, the 2025 London audience, enjoyed a top class performance of ENO’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” at the London Coliseum.
Period costumes but a minimal set, abstracted to the essentials necessary to support the absurd storyline, gives the production the flexibility to tell truths though serious and comic moments, ridiculing “duty” in particular but taking in family succession, loyalty to the Crown, women’s rights and ageism etc. along the way.
The hapless hero Frederic (William Morgan) engaged the audience’s sympathy when he first stepped forward from the symbolic pirate ship; Frederic gets some great lines of music and text which were received warmly.
Richard Suart (Major-General Stanley) gave us his individual performance of the classic patter song “I am the very model of a modern Major-General”, getting the words out clearly, with fine tone and characterisation. Most of the rest of the tunes come in Act 2, with the squad of hapless policemen, led by James Creswell (Sergeant of the Police), taking the story to new heights of comic absurdity and pathos with their march with the refrain “Taratar".
This production plays the score and libretto straight, there are hardly any topical political references but as “The Pirates of Penzance” works on so many levels, musical and literary, it is left to the audience, puzzled and intrigued, to work it all out. Meanwhile the tunes keep coming.
Wonderfully flexibly conducting from Natalie Murray Beale, letting the singers breathe and holding the choruses together, along with great music from the ENO orchestra.
It’s not long now before we will feel the gap following ENO’s move out of the Coliseum to a new life for the company based in a new home in Manchester.
Richard Suart - Major-General Stanley
John Savournin - The Pirate King
Henry Neill - Samuel
William Morgan - Frederic, pirate apprentice
James Creswell - Sergeant of the Police
Isabelle Peters - Mabel
Bethan Langford - Edith
Anna Elizabeth Cooper - Kate
Gaynor Keeble - Ruth
Natalie Murray Beale - Conductor
Mike Leigh - Director
Sarah Tipple - Revival Director
Alison Chitty - Designer
Paul Pyant - Original Lighting Designer
Ian Jackson-French - Revival Lighting Designer
Sarah Weltman & Dominic Bilkey - Sound Designer
Francesca Jaynes - Original Choreographer
Matthew Quinn - Chorus Director
Chorus and orchestra of English National Opera