It’s highly fitting that Stuart Maunder finishes his run as Artistic Director with what may be his first and earliest love – Gilbert and Sullivan.

And he’s leaving us not with a single production, but with a festival of three operettas, a concert of Sullivan’s sacred music and a cabaret featuring Maunder himself.

To date, I’ve generally avoided G&S, but with this production of The Pirates of Penzance, all pieces of the puzzle fit and I’m finally able to see why these works have maintained their popularity, while other Victorian staples – Belloc, R.L. Stevenson and Kipling, for example – no longer command much attention.

Revisiting G&S via this superb production reminds us of Sullivan’s mastery as a musical magpie drawing on the likes of Rossini, Offenbach and Verdi’s oom-pah bass lines, but also of his influence on music hall and the American musical. Similarly, Gilbert’s patter songs have gone on to influence Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner and, of course, the late Stephen Sondheim. In Gilbert’s satirising of the Victorian melodrama and its tropes, parallels can be seen between Penzance and Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, with its orphan and ensuing genealogical confusions.