A model Mikado

Gilbert and Sullivan may once have been cutting-edge satire, but their barbs have been dulled by decades of overly reverent affection. What G&S need is not bogus authenticity but a good roughing up, which Jonathan Miller's inspired production duly administers.

First seen at English National Opera in 1986, it starts from the irrefutable premise that The Mikado has not much to do with Japan and everything to do with Englishness and its discontents.

Stefanos Lazaridis's set and Sue Blane's costumes glide easily between late Victoriana and the Jazz Age, while Miller's staging roams still further afield, taking in Busby Berkeley, St Trinian's, end-of-the-pier variety and Carry On Up The Class System on the way.

Over the years it has perhaps acquired its own comfortable patina. On the opening night of this 10th revival, the sets got an ovation when the curtain went up, and almost every number, irrespective of the singing, got a round of applause: both symptoms of a certain cosiness creeping in.

But the waspish comedy survives intact, not least in the Little List of Richard Suart's Ko-Ko, which swipes at Raymond Gubbay's soon-tobeunveiled Savoy Opera as well as at Bush's little poodle Blair. Occasionally Suart's India-rubber performance, a volatile amalgam of Olivier and Les Dawson, allows hyperactivity to block the humour, but he works the crowd mercilessly.

One of the production's key jokes is to have all the singers overdoing the cut-glass accents, sometimes at the expense of textual clarity and vocal accuracy: a cardinal sin in G&S.

Nevertheless, Bonaventura Bottone and Jeni Bern enjoy themselves mightily as the insufferable Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum, while Ian Caddy's Pooh-Bah is every oleaginous inch the self-serving bureaucrat.

Not for the first time, though, the central character turns out to be Katisha. Frances McCafferty does a wonderful job of making her a gargoyle; but the production plays the ultimate prank on her by granting her its only moments of human warmth for her Act Two lament. It is only one of many coups in a staging that shows ENO back on riotous form.

Until 6 May. Information: 020 7632 8300.