My idea of fun

We don’t really do operetta in Britain these days — and at this stage in the game, I don’t really need to tell you why, do I? We’re simply too philistine in these benighted islands, goes the argument; too coarse, too provincial, too clodhoppingly Anglo-Saxon ever to grasp the ineffable lightness and sophisticated wit of Offenbach, Lehar and Strauss. So anyway, here’s Offenbach’s Croquefer, or The Last of the Paladins: a one-act comedy set in the time of the Crusades, which climaxes with the leading characters belting out a stormy ensemble as they succumb to a collective attack of explosive diarrhoea. Basses heave; the brass section emits ripe, flatulent parps. There’s your Gallic sophistication for you, right there.

This is no directorial intervention. Opera della Luna’s Jeff Clarke hasn’t suddenly come over all Calixto Bieito on us. It’s written into Jaime and Tréfeu’s libretto, it’s composed into Offenbach’s score; and in Clarke’s production it’s handled head-on, complete with the armless, legless and tongueless ‘dismembered knight’ Rattlebone yowling wordlessly along — as Offenbach specifies and as the Parisian censors of 1857, who wouldn’t allow more than four speaking parts on stage, insisted.