Raucous enthusiasm

Gilbert and Sullivan were the Little Britain of their day, savaging bourgeois pompousness and pretension with gleeful malice. Now their humour, like their music, can seem wan, although legions of admirers will tell you otherwise.

At English National Opera, Jonathan Miller's production of The Mikado inflated G&S grotesquerie to cartoonlike proportions, and has delighted fans and sceptics alike for nearly 20 years. If Elijah Moshinsky's new Coliseum staging of The Pirates of Penzance is less cruel and hence less amusing, it has its charms, not least a foppish band of brigands who, in Anne Tilby's colourful costumes, look like refugees from Adam and the Ants, dance like the Village People and talk like the disenfranchised aristocracy G&S intended them to be.

The Pirates had its premiere in New York in 1879. Then as now, bumbling Brits went down well in the States, and the ENO programme informs us that Moshinsky's production is the "property" of Chicago's Lyric Opera, where it had its first outing in February. Moshinsky plays to a few transatlantic ideas of Englishness, but if anything the show could do with more Yankee pizzazz, not to say vulgarity.

Maybe that will come as this run gets into its stride. Perhaps, too, Mark Shanahan's conducting will lighten up a shade, giving his singers a little more room. As the Pirate King, Karl Daymond sings with bluff and sometimes charmless tone, but his characterisation

fills the stage. Major-General Stanley has all Richard Suart's familiar, occasionally wearing "matter of patter" trademarks, and Mark Wilde's Frederic is sweetly ineffectual, but it is Victoria Joyce's Mabel who shines most brightly. Her light and piquant soprano makes it possible to believe, if only momentarily, that G&S were Rossini and Donizetti rolled into one.

Since ENO's return to the refurbished Coliseum last March, the atmosphere of feverish excitement we used to take for granted has been intermittent at best. A few box-office hits will put that right, and while Pirates is hardly cutting-edge opera, the first-night full house applauded with raucous enthusiasm, including, heaven forbid, synchronised clapping for the curtain-calls. Pantomime for grown-ups? G&S will do nicely.

Until 15 February. Information: 020 7632 8300.

The Pirates Of Penzance