It’s easy to dismiss the comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan as being ‘of their time’, quaint anachronisms that have become the acquired taste of older baby boomers. However, we have just witnessed a coronation full of reverent but bizarre ritual, rooted in the class system that Gilbert and Sullivan took great pleasure in mocking.

Hence, State Opera of South Australia’s festival of Gilbert and Sullivan might be the perfect follow-up reminder that the United Kingdom and Australia are not the egalitarian societies that they think they are.

The plot of H.M.S. Pinafore revolves around the societal and romantic constraints of Victorian rank, station and duty. Captain Corcoran of the HMS Pinafore is determined that his daughter Josephine shall marry up (so to speak) to Admiral Sir Joseph Porter. This is despite Corcoran’s inability to contain his own lustful feelings towards the lowly former ‘baby farmer’ Poor Little Buttercup.

Complicating matters is that Josephine is in love, much to her own dutiful distaste, with the strapping sailor Ralph Rackstraw. In true Gilbert and Sullivan fashion, everything is out of whack. Emotions are in conflict with duty and convention. The heart is at war with the brain.