It’s the music, stupid

‘Welcome to our hearts again, Iolanthe!’ sings the fairy chorus in Gilbert and Sullivan’s fantasy-satire, and during this exuberant new production by Cal McCrystal you could almost hear the assembled G&S fans sighing in agreement. Iolanthe is our trump card against the sceptics, and not merely because Gilbert’s digs at parliamentary politics are still so startlingly acute. No, we insist, it’s the music, stupid: just listen to it! Sullivan’s score gleefully assimilates Handel, Mendelssohn and Wagner (Tannhäuser, Rheingold; even Tristan und Isolde), and to fly that close to the magic flame of Bayreuth without getting frazzled is something that very few composers have achieved with such freshness and melodic grace.

So that’s the fans spoken for. McCrystal’s job is to make everyone else laugh, and he’s at it from the off, with gags even before the curtain rises on a stage filled with colossal multicoloured flowers. The designer, the late Paul Brown, has taken his cues not just from G&S’s own creative lineage (grand opera meets 19th-century music hall), but from the stylistic layers of the score.