4 STARS, May 25-27. Sasha Regan’s innovative all-male production transplants The Mikado to a 1950s campsite overrun by excitable schoolboys
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This might not sound like a natural fit for an opera that’s famously set in a fictional Japanese city. It doesn’t take long, however, for the adept cast and the cleverly designed set to win you over. By losing the Japanese setting, this production locates The Mikado firmly in the country that it’s satirising, adding even more potency to its sly jabs at the British bureaucracy.
The seemingly simple set proves to be surprisingly flexible and innovative. Tents rotate, and characters disappear from inside them. Even the most humble objects - chalkboards, stacks of crates - are used to great comic effect throughout the piece. It’s great fun to watch the makeshift world being pieced together – a city and its citizens conjured from a cluster of tents and a gang of schoolboys.
The action of the opera is sandwiched within a kind of frame narrative. At the beginning of the production, a bespectacled and bullied child curls up beside the campfire clutching a cricket bat. What follows – the story of The Mikado itself – is presented as a kind of outlandish dream.
Nanki-Poo arrives in Titipu in search of his true love, Yum-Yum. He’s disguised as a wandering minstrel, but is really the son of the dread Mikado. He’s on the run from his father’s court in order to escape marriage to a besotted elderly noblewoman, Katisha.
He’s heartbroken to learn that Yum-Yum is unwillingly engaged to Ko-Ko (played with great comic verve by David McKechnie). Formerly a cheap tailor, Ko-Ko was sentenced to death for flirting. At the last minute, however, he was reprieved by the citizens of Titipu and appointed the Lord High Executioner. Despite the fact that he’s held this exulted position for a year, he’s yet to actually execute anybody (he avoids it on the technicality that ‘who’s next to be decapited cannot cut off another’s head until he’s cut his own off’.)
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Things get a lot more complicated when Ko-Ko receives a letter from the Mikado – a masterful performance by James Waud – demanding that he execute somebody within a month or face the consequences.
Where Sasha Regan’s production excels is in its response to the witty irreverence with which The Mikado treats even its most sombre themes. It’s an opera that’s full of changeable, slippery characters. Ko-Ko won’t be happy with any woman but Yum-Yum – until he decides that he doesn’t much care. Yum-Yum wants to marry Nanki-Poo, until she changes her mind to save her own skin – and changes it back again when the danger has passed. Katisha wants Ko-Ko boiled in hot oil - until she decides to marry him instead. Nanki-Poo is legally dead until he’s brought back to life, triumphantly, to confront his father and wed his love.
In The Mikado, the great constants of life – love and loss – are treated with lightness. They are shown to be fickle and unfixed, our most profound emotions and unshakeable convictions almost always trumped by self-love.
The campfire setting of this production reflects this irreverence with the utmost sympathy. Nothing is taken seriously – the props are objects hastily gathered from the campsite. The very axe that is central to the decapitation plot is simply a cricket bat. The women aren’t actually women. We’re encouraged to laugh at everything, and to take nothing to heart.
The play ends where it began – with a bespectacled schoolboy asleep beside a campfire. But when he wakes, he finds that he is accepted by the boys who once bullied him. It’s a fitting tribute to the transformative power of The Mikado’s joyful spirit of silliness and irreverence.
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