Wednesday 4 August 2021

Pirates Ahoy! Charles Court Opera & Opera Holland Park join forces for vivaciously energetic G&S

Gilbert & Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance - Frederick Long, Richard Burkhard, John Savournin- Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera (Photo Ali Wright)
Gilbert & Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance - Frederick Long, Richard Burkhard, John Savournin- Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera (Photo Ali Wright)

Gilbert & Sullivan The Pirates of Penzance; Daisy Brown, Peter Kirk, Richard Burkard, John Savournin, Yvonne Howard, Trevor Eliot Bowes, cond: David Eaton, City of London Sinfonia; Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera

Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 3 August 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
This co-production brings an engaging energy to the G&S classic.

Opera Holland Park's final new production of the season opened last night (3 August 2021), a co-production with Charles Court Opera, Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance was directed by John Savournin, artistic director of Charles Court Opera, who also sang the Pirate King and conducted by David Eaton, music director of Charles Court Opera, with the City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus, Daisy Brown as Mabel, Peter Kirk as Frederic, Yvonne Howard as Ruth, Richard Burkhard as Major-General Stanley and Trevor Eliot Bowes as the Police Sergeant.

Charles Court Opera specialises in revitalising music-theatre with well-regarded small-scale productions of Gilbert & Sullivan [see Anthony's review of their 2018 performance of The Mikado]. This production, on the rather larger Opera Holland Park stage, had a litheness and energy to it which belied the theatre's wide open space. Spoken dialogue is also tricky here, but much use was made of the thrust stage, and the cast brought out the wit of Gilbert's tosy-turvydom without losing comprehensibility or energy.

After a lively account of the overture with single strings and wind (reduced orchestration by Richard Balcombe) bringing different colours to Sullivan's orchestration, we saw the young Frederic opening his birthday presents watched by his nursemaid Ruth (Yvonne Howard), these included a wind-up toy soldier, a pirate ship and bricks. It was from these, writ large, that Savournin's imaginative production was created. The plot is not one of Gilbert's sharpest, at a remove of 140 years (the piece debuted in 1879) the work's humour seems gentle and the opera reliant on the sophistication of Sullivan's score including plenty of quasi-operatic moments and, as the programme book illuminated, references to well-known music. So, Savournin's whimsical nursery toy production set amongst the blocks of Rachel Szmukler's simple but effective design placed the piece nicely, though perhaps the more dangerous edge to Gilbert's topsy-turveydom was lost (the programme book also highlighted his anarchism with Mike Leigh's comment about Gilbert being a proto-Surrealist!)

Gilbert & Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance - Peter Kirk, Daisy Brown- Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera (Photo Ali Wright)
Gilbert & Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance - Peter Kirk, Daisy Brown- Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera (Photo Ali Wright)

Peter Kirk made an engagingly appealing Frederic, lyric of voice and with an ease and charm that came over well. Eager and naive, Kirk managed to imbue Frederic with personality as well as having the underlying vocal power to fill the theatre. The heroine, Mabel, makes her entrance with a coloratura waltz song in which Sullivan and Gilbert immediately send up popular 19th century operas (Gounod for instance). Daisy Brown was perfection at this moment, singing the coloratura with practised ease yet also with a knowing air, casually throwing off the roulades with a sparkle in her eye, and throughout the evening this Mabel charmed yet hinted at something more knowing.

Richard Burkhard brought a deft verbal touch to the patter of his entrance number, 'I am the very model of a modern Major-General', and elsewhere balanced the gruff with the more touching elements, though I wondered whether the depiction of the character as a wind-up toy might have been a bit limiting. Yvonne Howard made a delightful Ruth, homely and warm so that you felt sorry for her, and she made her opening solo a lovely piece of story telling. John Savournin was a dashingly colourful Pirate King and like his pirate cohorts completely lacking in real danger.

The Major-General's six daughters were played by the four women of Opera Holland Park chorus, including Lotte Betts-Dean as Isabel, plus Alys Meredid Roberts as Edith and Sophie Dicks as Kate. All charm and delight, yet knowing too, these were pure theatrical creatures. As their counter-parts the Pirates the four men of the Opera Holland Park chorus were joined by Frederick Long's wonderfully over-the-top Samuel, creating a believably comic-book feel to the Pirates. They rose to the admirable challenge of splitting the chorus into two during Act Two so that Trevor Eliot Bowes' seriously funny Sergeant was joined by two chorus members as policemen.

Gilbert & Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance - Trevor Eliot Bowes & Opera Holland Park Chorus- Peter Kirk, Daisy Brown- Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera (Photo Ali Wright)
Gilbert & Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance - Trevor Eliot Bowes & Opera Holland Park Chorus- Peter Kirk, Daisy Brown- Opera Holland Park, Charles Court Opera (Photo Ali Wright)

Throughout, the chorus was hard working, all-singing, all-dancing (choreography by David Hulston) as the music needs and filling the stage with a vivacious energy which belied that there were only eight of them. The advantage of this smallness of numbers, as with the orchestra, was that there was a litheness, manoevrability and vividness to the performance. Lush, operatic G&S can sometimes iron out the energy of the pieces and there was certainly no danger of that here.

Savournin's production came from a place of understanding and affection, the slightly knowing performance had no real axes to grind, thankfully, and simply presented us with the operetta (both words and music) and allowed us to enjoy it and draw our own conclusions.





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