‘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. Strephon (Marcus Farnsworth) and Phyllis (Ellie Laugharne) are dressed like porcelain figures in a Gainsborough Arcadia; when realism crashes in, it’s with an unambiguously Victorian self-confidence.
McCrystal crams this world with visual comedy. The chorus of Peers performs a non-stop beer-bottle juggling act, a puppet horse defecates on-stage and an officious fireman (an invention of McCrystal’s) peremptorily extinguishes the Fairy Queen’s thunderbolts. Cast members can soar aloft at any moment, and frequently do. It’s the music, though, stupid: and while this isn’t a cast full of superstar voices, exactly, they’re all highly listenable and endlessly game. Yvonne Howard’s Fairy Queen is a Valkyrie with a twinkle in her eye, Laugharne shapes her lines with delightful alertness, and Andrew Shore’s turkey-cock of a Lord Chancellor bustles through his patter songs with champagne clarity.
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