Mike Leigh's the Pirates of Penzance - English National Opera

I've seen many and various productions of Pirates of Penzance over the years, and find this one strangely colourless. The quality of the singing is fine, but the acting less so. The characters are pretty bland and static and lacking the humour that should be bursting forth. Chorus just stand there. The sets are simplistic to say the least, there's no sense of the rolling, rollicking seas, or the eerie ruins in the second act. Bright red pirate ship deck, plain blue backdrops. The feeling I get is one of an amateur production. Frederic looks bored half the time, the Pirate King does not swash and buckle, the Major General is a bit dodgy. And Ruth's eyes are scary! This is meant to be a romp; it comes across as turgid.

Director Mike Leigh must have fond memories of schoolboy productions of G&S operas as he faithfully reproduces one here. What is most noticeable about this production is that he succeeds in removing all trace of humour from the proceedings. There is no attempt to give the pirates or the young ladies individual characters. The ladies, in particular move around the stage like a flock of sheep. The choreography, such as it is, is lamentable. The production looks lost on the vast Colluseum stage. Designer Alison Chitty vignettes some of the scenes in garish geometrical shapes but this only serves to emphasise the emptiness of most of the stage. The recording of the vocal dialogue is unpleasantly boomy.

Joshua Bloom as the pirate king and Robert Murray as Frederic are rather bland. Andrew Shore struggles with his Major-General patter song and too often parts company with the orchestra. Claudia Boyle is an impressive Mabel and deserves to be in a better production.

This is one of Gilbert's sillier libretti although Sullivan provides some of his best music. It is debatable whether this silly story of pirates who are really noblemen who have gone astray can ever be successfully produced for a modern audience. The evidence of this production suggests that this opera is a poor wandering one.

'The Pirates of Penzance' was my first Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and to this day it is tied with 'The Mikado' as their best. It is just so much fun and Sullivan's score has so much wit and beauty.

Mike Leigh is a fine director, and Andrew Shore (the one principal familiar to me) seemed a perfect fit for Major-General Stanley. Yet there was also some intrepidation, seeing as English National Opera have been a very mixed bag of late. 'Benvenuto Cellini' was surprisingly good (considering Terry Gilliam underwhelmed with his 'The Damnation of Faust' a few years earlier) and 'The Barber of Seville' was very good. Had mixed views on 'Peter Grimes' which was brilliant musically but needed more tragedy and conflict in a production where expressionism, claustrophobia and immature shenanigans got in the way, while 'Carmen' replaced passion with vulgarity and bad taste and 'La Traviata' left me stone cold which is bad for one of the emotional operas there is.

Good news is that 'The Pirates of Penzance' is not only the best of the productions mentioned in this review but it is ENO's best in a while. Would have preferred a less comic-grotesque and slightly more sympathetic Ruth, though Rebecca De Pont Davies does sing the role very well. But that is pretty much it really with the quibbles. It is a very attractive production visually, simple but never simplistic, the costumes are beautiful to look at bursting with sumptuous colour and the sets show an effective use of blue and green for the water and the mountains.

Leigh's direction is great throughout as well, never being static or distasteful. The more underplayed and played-straight approach to some parts, like with the policemen, could have easily become pedestrian with the humour sucked out, but the approach actually works very well, it is still amusing and has a good amount of depth as well. The funny parts sparkle with wit, with the performers clearly having a ball with Gilbert's brilliant dialogue, the rousing parts like "Pour Oh Pour the Pirate Sherry" really do rouse while the more tender parts like "Ah Leave Me Not to Pine" and "Oh is there not one maiden breast" have a real gentle poignancy.

Nothing to complain about musically either. The orchestra have so much energy and nuance to their playing, the pirates sing and characterise with rousing gusto, the ladies representing the daughters sing with beautiful blending and cut a beguiling presence and the policemen even when understated don't lose the essence of their roles and don't fall under-pitch in "When a felon is not engaged in his employment" (a dangerous trap). David Parry's conducting helps matters enormously, with him bringing out the vitality and lyricism of Sullivan's music superbly.

With only minor reservations with the Ruth, the casting and performances are pitched more than ideally, with standouts being Joshua Bloom's very rich-voiced and swaggering Pirate King, Jonathan Lemalu's effectively deadpan yet melancholic chief policeman and Andrew Shore's buoyant Major-General Stanley (as to be expected he copes excellently with the patter, where every word is crisply enunciated which is not easy with so many words in rapid-fire succession). Claudia Boyle is an affecting Mabel and she dazzles in her Colouratura in her entrance and in "Poor Wandering One", while Robert Murray is a dashing Frederic, singing "Oh is there not one maiden breast" with such touching lyricism.

Overall, underplayed yet uproarious, as well as being musically perfect. 9/10 Bethany Cox