Ruddigore review – straight staging maroons G&S’s silly satire in the Victorian age

It’s now most of a theatre-going lifetime since Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas ceased to be the sole preserve of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1961. These days G&S’s works are programmed by major opera companies. Performed with the right blend of precision and panache, much of Sullivan’s music remains irresistible – unless you can’t stand his mash-up of Donizetti, Offenbach and English ballad-opera. The challenge is to make Gilbert’s late-Victorian topical satire’n’silliness speak to another era.

In this respect, Ruddigore was an odd choice for Charles Court Opera’s third G&S co-production with Opera Holland Park. It takes a lengthy pop at Victorian melodrama (not a theatrical genre that troubles most of us) and trundles slowly – with its professional bridesmaids and identity reveals, ghosts and etiquette-obsessed heroine – towards a sudden legal-loophole resolution in its final moments. Victorian audiences were unconvinced: the piece wasn’t revived in the lifetimes of its authors. Even the OHP programme asks cheerfully: “Is Ruddigore a comedy for chaps?”

View image in fullscreen

To my non-chap mind, it needn’t be. But unlike CCO’s previous co-productions at Opera Holland Park – The Pirates of Penzance in 2021, HMS Pinafore in 2022 – Ruddigore does need a strong directorial steer. Played “straight” and in Edwardian-ish costumes (apart from some unexplained 1970s tweed towards the end), John Savournin’s staging was characterised by brief, moderately energetic dance routines. The professional bridesmaids – wearing baby-pink frills and fixed, anodyne smiles as they sashayed with admirable commitment – were like extras from Barbie, without the feminism. The spoken text was mostly delivered in a kind of mid-century Queen’s English and too often shouted, as if Gilbert had written only in bold.

This was a shame. Above all because much of the singing was excellent. Dame Hannah, Heather Shipp’s warm mezzo, had all the Big Matron Energy the role demands, while Heather Lowe’s Mad Margaret switched between creamy legato and cartoon-madwoman squawks with ease. Stephen Gadd (Rigoletto on the same stage just a few months ago) brought stentorian splendour to the ghost of Sir Roderic Murgatroyd. Conductor David Eaton was tireless in his pursuit of tight ensemble (come dance routine or patter-song) across OHP’s large stage and the City of London Sinfonia were brave though not always polished in the unforgivingly transparent reduction of Sullivan’s score. Savournin himself, superb as Sir Despard Murgatroyd, is increasingly an essential advocate for this repertoire – but his enthusiasm alone can’t carry this piece back to life.