Flair for the Orient

The Carl Rosa Opera Company was founded in 1875, and for 75 years took operas both rare and familiar to all corners of the land. Its near-namesake, the Carl Rosa Company, came into being just six years ago and also travels up and down the country. However, its repertoire is less capacious: mostly operetta, mostly Gilbert and Sullivan.

Its artistic director, Peter Mulloy, has lavished much care and attention on the décor for this staging of The Mikado, particularly the costumes, seen in Mike Leigh's film Topsy-Turvy, and resurrected for the company's London debut. Very attractive they are too, and possibly quite authentically Japanese.

But The Mikado has as much to do with Japan as Bizet's Carmen has to do with Seville, which is not very much. Filling the stage with sundry mouldy orientalisms, including synchronised fan twitching and massed mincing, does not go very far. What is required is less affectionate re-creation, more radical deconstruction. Or perhaps that is merely the opinion of a G&S sceptic.

In any case, Mulloy had assembled a creditable cast, packed with singing actors (or acting singers) with real comic flair, their performances receiving affectionate support from conductor Richard Balcombe. Deborah Myers'

Yum-Yum was less sweetly sung than it might have been, but the hint of metal in the voice nicely undercut the character's disagreeable pertness.

As her suitor Nanki-Poo, Ivan Sharpe had gawky charm and a pleasingly ardent light tenor, although he sounded uncomfortable in some of the spoken dialogue.

Two performances, though, achieved the cruel grotesquerie that The Mikado requires. Simon Butteriss's Ko-Ko was a triumph of cartoonish exaggeration, all double-takes and overblown campery. His specially concocted "little list" had plenty of targets who'll surely not be missed, including anti-gay archbishops and a princess whose dog mauls her mum's corgi. Meanwhile, Gillian Knight's Katisha was a chill blast of real opera, like one of Janacek's ageing harridans in overdrive. She also made the most of the words, surely essential in any G&S performance but only intermittently the case here.

The Mikado