Masters of G&S return to Newbury with 5-star London production of The Mikado

Newbury Spring Festival:The Mikado by Charles Court Opera
at the Corn Exchange on Saturday, May 14. Review by LIN WILKINSON

Charles Court Opera’s five-star London production of The Mikado was warmly received by a capacity audience.

First performed in 1885, it is set in Japan, but was written as a barely concealed satire on British politics and institutions. It could hardly be more apt, given the parlous state of our contemporary political discourse.

The ‘othering’ of Japanese life and customs could sit uncomfortably with modern audiences, but here, in a nod to contemporary mores, those elements were partly neutralised, with some marginal updating of the text and the production set throughout in the British Consulate in Japan.

Pooh-Bah, oleaginous, cynical and venal, is a diplomat based there, and the Mikado is the Governor of Japan, a British General, delayed by “crowded rush-hour trains”. (He was lucky to have found one running.) The consulate, with the exception of a Japanese screen, was the dead spit of a London gentlemen’s club: leather sofa, comfortable chairs, and newspapers and whisky on tap.

Sung and acted with panache, it’s as much pantomime as operetta. The plot is absurd, but it’s packed with quick-fire wit and much-loved songs, ‘The Sun Whose Rays are All Ablaze’ and ‘On a Tree by a River’ vocal highlights.

No cast list was available, so it’s not possible to assign singers’ names to their parts. Nanki-Poo (tenor) was suitably ardent, and Yum-Yum, an expressive soprano, was spirited and head over heels in love, but not sufficiently so to be buried alive. There is a limit. She and her two girlfriends (thankfully none of them dressed as under-age schoolgirls), were hard-headed when it was politic to be so, with Pooh-Bah (baritone) wrapped round their little fingers.

The jokes were, of course, enjoyably dreadful: “My suit was hopeless,” says the tailor Ko-Ko (a warm baritone) of his doomed pursuit of Yum-Yum. Now elevated to a squeamish Lord High Executioner, he played the part to full comedic effect, a Mark Steel sound-alike: a London wide-boy with a heart, in too-short trousers and a dodgy waistcoat.

Patronised by those who consider themselves his betters (“I was born sneering,” admits Pooh-Bah), Ko-Ko is, however, possessed of a quick brain in sticky circumstances. He and Katisha, a rather terrifying mezzo, “an acquired taste” by her own admission, end up as an item, but you sensed they were more than a match for each other.

The audience ̶ overwhelmingly of the expected demographic ̶ got what they came for: an old friend, but here one that pushed against the traditional G&S straitjacket.