The Mikado
- Robert Beale
- 36 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Gilbert & Sullivan
National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company
Buxton Opera House
August 5,8,9,15, 2026: 2 hrs 40 mins
Jeff Clarke’s Opera della Luna adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan masterpiece The Mikado is well over 20 years old now, and has been revived more than once - its most recent visit to the North being last year, to Salford's Lowry (see here).
But for this production Clarke has expanded what was a miniaturised version, with no chorus (half a dozen principals singing the choral numbers) and tiny orchestra, back to the full orchestra, chorus and personnel of the original. The result is a triumph.
The Clarke concept has always been a dazzle of colour: taking his cue from the popularity, in the 1880s, of colourful Japanese kimonos, he reimagines the work in the fashion world of recent memory, setting the opening scene in a kind of tailoring sweatshop where the “gentlemen of Japan” announce themselves while seated at sewing machines.
The succession of outlandish costumes continues, and among the pleasures of the Clarke modernisation are freedom for Ko-Ko (Lord High Executioner) and later the Mikado of Japan himself, to update the lyrics of “I’ve got a little list” and the “Punishment fits the crime” song to mention individuals and aspects of the world we could all happily be rid of. Thanks to Simon Butteriss and Ben McAteer, respectively, for those.
It all gets to be pure nonsense in the “Here’s a pretty state of things” trio, long preserved in aspic by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company of old as a succession of encores. It is now offered with some ludicrous puppetry at the back of the set and apparent exhaustion for the three of them by the end.
John Andrews conducts the National Festival Orchestra with obvious love for the score, and outdoes even James Hendry in his gentle stroking of Sullivan’s most sentimental melodies.
Bonuses in the new full company version are the sound of the G&S Festival chorus in full cry and the quality of the principal singers. Eleanor Sanderson-Nash (ex-RNCM), as Yum-Yum, is the best soprano soloist in the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company’s ranks this year and sings “The sun whose rays” beautifully; Grant Doyle is excellent as Pooh-Bah, and David Webb brings his heroic tenor to Nanki-Poo - as he did to Ralph Rackstraw in HMS Pinafore.
Simon Butteriss transforms to a cool young Carnaby-Streeter for Ko-Ko - reminiscent of his previous incarnations but full of new idea, just as when he made him a minor public school master for Sarah Helsby Hughes at Buxton in 2023. Giles Davies makes a nice job of the Yorkshire-accented Pish-Tush (fittingly convinced of his own correctness in “Our great Mikado”). And Gaynor Keeble is as good as ever as the harridan Katisha – finally moved, as we all are, by the near-real pathos of Butteriss’s “On a tree by a river”.
Re-timing and relocating The Mikado is seen as compulsory today, it seems, as doing it in the old cod-Japanese way is deemed culturally inappropriate (though there are sly touches from it here, fans in the opening, female Ninjas in the finale, for example). But Clarke got there first by a long way, and I think his remaking is still the best.
More info and tickets here
