This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Say what you like about musical theatre in London, the odd shaft of light does occasionally flash through the grisly scene. I can scarcely contain my excitement, for example, at the prospect of Mozart: Her Story, coming up in November, wherein Wolfy’s “arguably more talented sister”, “Nan”, gets to overturn centuries of patriarchal bullshit somehow or other, yeah?

As you slump in despair through Les Mis or the nauseating Hamilton, it is poignant to reflect that next year marks the 150th anniversary of the premiere of Trial by Jury, Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert’s first joint venture, and the starting gun for the marvels of 20th century musical theatre.

Their 14 comic operas, written between 1871 and 1896, were the true begetters of the Golden Age of musicals, their patent mix of fizzing lyrics and understatedly sophisticated music the model for everything from Showboat to West Side Story and Sondheim. And they can’t really be blamed for the plague of The Lion King and the rest.

The Sorcerer was G&S’s next lark after the success of TBJ, itself a bomb dropped into the frightful world of mid-Victorian musical entertainment.

That gave you a choice between the moronic prole lolz of the music hall, where you could get the clap free with the price of a ticket, the determinedly whorish French operetta, or — clearly the worst of the lot — the chilling “German Reed Entertainments”, self-described as “respectable theatre”.

Then up popped G&S to remind the poor blighted English bourgeois that they were sentient creatures, that they were permitted to remove the broomsticks from up their arses and not pretend they were in church the whole time. TBJ and The Sorcerer were wildly popular; the next year HMS Pinafore appeared — and the most genial and delightful of modern theatrical innovations was launched.

Sure, G&S might lack the showbiz razz of Kiss Me, Kate and co., but they still excite terrifically strong reactions — including, naturally, from the ranks of the humourless mortified by any manifestation of Englishness: Jonathan Miller called G&S “UKIP set to music”; Germaine Greer derided the audience as “racist, right-wing Olde Englande nerdery”.

God only knows what torments the self-haters de nos jours go through: how, they wonder, could the effete wankers who produced this mincing stuff also trample half the world under their pitiless jackboot? (Easy one, of course: the ever-willing Scots and Irish were delighted to do most of our dirty work.)

Pleasingly, there also exists an opposite reaction, surprisingly ecstatic given the somewhat mousy fanbase, largely drawn from the shopkeeper class that Gilbert had such fun with — Bow, you lower middle classes! — and this, I suppose, is the true source of the fury and rage of the bien pensants.

These days the fans are very well served. Whilst our big opera houses are hopeless at operetta, there exists a thriving semi-underground of Good Companions-style touring groups: in fact, since the mercy-killing of the old D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, these shows have been freed by a new generation of performers unbound by grim tradition, of which two of the brightest purveyors are Opera della Luna and Charles Court Opera, both on the road this summer.

It would be fatuous to pretend that G&S performance isn’t fraught with danger. This latest outing from Charles Court tiptoes the narrowest isthmus between the twin perils of the ghastly and the cute, a magical sliver of land that unlocks the power and charm of the works.

Take the setting chosen by designer Lucy Fowler, clearly flirting with catastrophe: Mrs P’s vintage Citroen tea-and-cake van, in baby-blue and baby-pink, stencilled with wildflowers. The blood runs cold, and yet there is no need to panic. How can it not be insufferable, playing this English version of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore in front of such a cliché? — you fear we might tip over into Benjamin Britten’s deathly Albert Herring any moment. But no.

The story’s as simple as you like, perked up with Gilbert’s usual fancies. Posh boy Alexis, though engaged to posh girl Aline, is a cranky idealist bent on selling the notion that love should know no social barriers, and his impassioned lectures to this effect go down well in Working Men’s Clubs and Lunatick Asylums.

He gets the semi-charlatan sorcerer John Wellington Wells to feed a love potion to everyone in the village, resulting in some wildly inappropriate matings that luckily wear off before too long, allowing normal rank-pairing to be restored.

And that’s it — not exactly War and Peace, though as a peg for a lot of irreverences and poignant asides about Victorian horrors it’s highly efficient, but more to the point a light-fingered delight. Gilbert’s unexpectedly humane fondness for grey-haired love is nicely treated through the anodyne young couple’s widowed parents, whose ancient unexpressed passion is really the hidden heart of the piece.

And the self-irony runs deep: the music hides its cleverness behind jog-trot and parody, Gilbert’s tumbling wit undermines itself at every turn, and the idiotic parade of vicars, toffs and petty bourgeois somehow creates an extravagant sense of joy in their absurdist celebration of absurdity. The gates of sanctimony shall not prevail against them — though I grant you, the next few years could be quite a test.

The Sorcerer, Charles Court Opera at the G&S Festival, Buxton, July 27-August 10; Yeomen of the Guard, Opera della Luna at Opera Holland Park, August 7-10; The Parson’s Pirates, Wilton’s Music Hall, August 27-31.