The laugh factor

Ruddigore, Lowry, Salford
OPERA North returns to Salford for a winter season of popular repeats - this work and the hugely successful Madam Butterfly and a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades - and sets the week off in some style with this highly-entertaining, 18-month-old version of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.

This is a work that needs healthy resources to do well and Richard Hudson’s set doesn’t fail to set the tone, moving from bedroom to promenade, to church interior and finally to the famous Murgatroyd portrait gallery of act two, where pictures of ancestors descend from a high-perspective pair of walls of impressive heft and scale to torment the castle’s latest incumbent.

This is the G and S satire on romance, crime and legacy, in which professional bridesmaids perk up at any whiff of an impending marriage and leading lady Rose Maybud (Amy Freston) changes her allegiances almost as easily as her shoes.

Diffident leading man Robin Oakapple, meanwhile, turns to master criminal at the merest mention that it is expected of him — except that he isn’t too keen on his ancestors’ curse that he must commit a crime every day or suffer a horrible death. Hence their descent in the gallery and a stern talking-too.

Though I have seen this work several times in the past, director Jo Davies really brought it to modern life in this production, giving us a black and white, Twenties movie comedy style, with white-faced, moustache-laden villains, hammy overacting and innocent... well, innocents, not to mention a regularly updated and funny patter song for reformed character Despard (Richard Burkhard).

On its Lowry debut it seemed extraordinarily fresh and funny, but this revival — conducted last night by stand-in John Wilson — has acquired a couple of minor problems.

One is that the singers had trouble, at least from my seat, in projecting Gilbert’s remarkable words with sufficient clarity for me to catch most of them. Also, at times, the acting seemed a little too much, as if the ensemble didn’t quite trust that the production was strong enough on its own.

This aside, returning singers Grant Doyle as Robin, Heather Shipp as Mad Margaret and their colleagues, notably Hal Cazalet as Dauntless, keep the laugh factor pretty high.